I'm a certified pilot, which in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 means I've completed just enough training to squeak past my exams with a "C" grade, I sorta understand what trim does, and I usually bounce my planes and choppers a few times while landing them. And as much as I'm enjoying free flight and activities like landmark visits and animal photography, I'm really only about one thing when it comes to MSFS 2024: career mode.
Career mode is the reason I've played 40 hours of MSFS over the past couple weeks. It's also the reason I've been stressed and unhappy over the past couple of weeks. It all comes down to one thing, by which I mean a whole bunch of things: bugs. Career mode is so, so buggy. But as angry and tense and irritable as it makes me, I just can't stop playing.
Before we even get to the bugs, here's how career mode works. When you begin, you don't own planes or a company: you're just a merc pilot, so if you take a job that pays a few thousand credits you only earn a few hundred of them. Less, if you screw up during the flight. Once you earn about 20,000 credits—much of which you first need to spend on certification exams to access jobs that will let you earn those credits—you get the chance to buy your own company and your first (heavily discounted) airplane, and start working for yourself.
With an entire world to choose from as a starting place, I pick a small airport called Mission Field in Livingston, Montana because I'm a Livingston and I want to do some missions. On a field. My first few jobs are "flightseeing" trips, where I take some randomly generated passengers, who speak with all the charm of a text-to-speech program because that's what they are, for quick tours over their hometowns. It's pretty dull stuff: no offense, Montana, but Billings isn't exactly Paris in terms of scenery.
That's fine, I'm a beginner, and I'm happy with the slow pace of progress and meager earnings. I figure I'll scrape up these cruddy little missions around my home base and eventually gain access to more airports and regions, going from a small county in Montana to the whole state, then maybe other states in the US, and finally, someday, international.
Weirdly, it doesn't really work that way. Three missions in, I'm suddenly informed I can start doing flightseeing trips in… Italy. How the heck did that happen? The rest of the world is still locked: I can't get to surrounding US states or even most of Montana without paying large fees I can't afford to unlock access to more airports, but a big chunk of Italy is abruptly available to me. Soon after that, I do my first mission in Madagascar, then a spot in France opens up, and a mission in Australia. So much for starting small and progressively widening my play area.
I know it's weird complaining about this aspect of career mode, because it's nice to grind my little dinky missions over other parts of the planet (I saw a kangaroo once). Maybe I would have gotten bored seeing nothing but Montana jobs after a while, but it doesn't feel sensible, progression-wise, for my boss to send my rookie ass halfway around the globe to deliver some cardboard boxes in a Cessna. I can explore the world literally whenever I want in free mode and in other activities, so I wouldn't mind being more restricted in career mode, if only for immersion's sake.
As I earn more credits I spend most of them getting certified on different aircraft which give me access to a buncha new sky-jorbs. Now I can take skydivers to altitude and watch them jump out of my plane and take impatient passengers between airports in a helicopter. More robotically delivered dialogue fills my ears, my favorite being when there's some placeholder text that literally consists of the word "Placeholder" which the AI dutifully reads out loud. Never fails to get a laugh out of me.
But I'm still loving the feeling of incremental progression, the trickle of credits into my account, and the delicious tension of waiting to see how many points I've had deducted after taxiing too quickly or receiving 27 urgent "Stall!" warnings or landing with so much speed I can't stop my plane until it's rolled off the runway and into the bushes.
And then… there's all the damn career mode bugs. I tend to do around three missions per session, and out of those three I'd say bugs tend to occur in roughly three of them.
Bugs are everywhere. I'm taxiing to a hold short (a place where you have to stop) which abruptly vanishes and appears somewhere else, often behind me, meaning I now have to do a U-turn in a plane on a narrow airstrip. I'll be preparing to land and I try to contact ATC but the button won't do anything. I'm docked points for not having my landing lights on at night, even though it's broad daylight. I'll get an error message for using my flaps at an unsafe speed while I'm sitting motionless on the tarmac. And on, and on, and on.
This stuff isn't always fatal, but mistakes during a flight, real or imagined, are tallied up and you lose points and therefore credits, which means slower progression and a lower reputation. It's frustrating because I'm a pretty poor pilot as it is and I'm already making mistakes of my own. I'll miss a hold short without it blipping away, I'll screw up my flaps when I'm actually in the air, I'll forget to let ATC know I'm about to land without the game doing it for me. It sucks to spend 30 or 40 minutes on a flight and get dinged for a bunch of stuff you didn't actually do wrong, especially when you've also done a bunch of other stuff wrong.
Popping in at 6,500 feet with your engine completely powered down? Your chopper passengers will love it.
"Skip to descent" are the three most dangerous three words in MSFS. If you're on a mission and you've reached cruising altitude, you can choose to skip the flight itself, which I almost always do: when you're not landing or taking off, flying (imho) is mostly just looking out a window at Montana (sorry again, Montana). Skipping to the end of the flight should start you off at an appropriate altitude and speed to begin a landing, but if often doesn't.
Did you want to abruptly appear 50 feet from the runway doing 120 knots? Probably not! How about popping in at 6,500 feet with your engine powered completely down? Your chopper passengers will love it. You can skip taxiing to your parking spot once you're on the ground, too, which might result in the plane flipping completely upside down. That's why they tell you to keep your seat belts buckled.
One type of cargo mission I enjoy uses taildragger planes (which have two wheels in the front and one in the back). But every time I accept a taildragger mission and skip to the descent, it teleports me to the ground at full engine power. Every single time. That's not always a huge problem: taildraggers need very little room to take off so I've completed missions by getting right back into the air again.
But one time it started me on the ground about 10 feet from some buildings so I just kept crashing until I finally had to abort the mission. I stopped taking taildragger cargo missions altogether because the risk of failure is too great. Even though I don't own the planes and I'm not on the hook for repairs, a bad flight still damages my pilot's reputation, which lowers my flight bonuses.
When I got into helicopter search and rescue missions, I thought I was in heaven. These are better than most missions because you don't just follow a straight line between airports, you have to fly over a large search area to find a missing hiker, land in the wilderness to scoop 'em up, then fly 'em back home. It's awesome. But unlike crashing when landing during, say, a cargo mission, where you can try again and only lose some of your score, if you crash a chopper with a rescued person in it, you insta-fail that mission. You can't try it again and you take a massive hit to your reputation.
Fair enough! Crashing with a civilian on board should come with a hefty punishment, but let me remind you: career mode gots bugs. One rescue mission took me ages to find the stranded hiker and it was extremely tough landing near enough to rescue them because they were surrounded by trees. After about 30 minutes, I finally managed to pick the guy up and headed back. The guidelines, the mission steps, and ATC instructions were all directing me to the airport runway, but when I was about 2 feet off the runway, an untextured square to my right was abruptly marked with a helipad icon. So… where was I supposed to land?
I just didn't trust that weird-looking helipad, so I stayed over the runway, trying to get it to recognize that I was hovering above it, and briefly touched my skids to the asphalt. Instafail. The game told me I'd put my passengers in danger, and my reputation nose-dived from nearly an A-rating all the way down to mid-B.
With such steep penalties for failing a mission and so many bugs I decided not to risk any more search and rescue ops. That stinks, because they were my favorite part of the mode.
Despite all the bugs that have lowered my flight rating and tanked my reputation, I keep playing career mode faithfully because, I dunno, I still enjoy the hell out of it, somehow? I'm pleased to say I finally grinded my way through enough piddly little missions to form my own company—Placeholder Airways—and buy my first plane. I'm a little annoyed that it's entirely white so you can barely even read the name of my company on the tail, and even more annoyed that while there's an option to repaint my plane (for 19,000 airbucks) I can't actually change its color, which seems ludicrous.
But I think this is just my relationship with MSFS: it doesn't treat me nicely, yet I still keep coming back.
And now I'm flying my own plane in career mode, which is terrifying. There are actually stakes now, because while I earn tons more from missions, I also have to pay repair fees, fuel, insurance, and other costs, and if I crash my plane it will simply be gone and I'll have to buy a new one, and those prices start at about half a million bucks.
I also now have to really worry about bugs, like the one that cropped up when I tried to fly my new company's inaugural mission:
Perfect. My next mission actually worked, though it was also bugged, not letting me contact ATC while landing, so I lost points. Plus, when I was trying to park, an airport employee kept walking in circles in my parking spot, making me think I was going to behead him with my propeller (I didn't).
The next mission was also bugged, showing me a landing pattern that would have taken me through the side of a mountain. My third mission was also also bugged—but this time the bug was in my favor. It told me I'd somehow scored 125% on the airline procedures performance metric, which raised my flight rating to S-tier, which finally put my pilot's reputation into A for the first time ever.
Hey, maybe that's why I keep playing this buggy mess of a career mode: sometimes these bugs come in handy.
(Note: a couple hours before I published this, a huge bug-fixing patch was released, and while I don't see any of the career mode bugs I mentioned on the list, maybe it'll make for a smoother experience.)
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