It’s been a little over a week since Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 came out and despite the troubles that we’ve had I’m also well on my way to digging into some of the new features of the sim. I’ve been playing, reading community comments, and forming some early impressions on career mode. It’s not time for a full review and I reserve the right to entirely change my mind but right now I see promise and some significant missteps with the experience on hand right now.

A guided experience

Let’s start with something that the new career experience is doing really well on the whole. It’s added a gaming experience into Microsoft Flight Simulator offering a guided process to learn about aviation and how things get done in aviation on a very basic level. It’s a familiar experience for many gamers and I have to applaud Microsoft and Asobo for making this work reasonably well.

The issue we’ve had over the years has been, of course, that flight simulation is a challenging thing to get into. And that’s largely because it relies on real world knowledge that you either accumulate in the sim or in the real world and either through direct practice or academically through books and literature and usually in a combination of all of the above. Sims in recent times have not been great at bringing new people in, however, and instead have catered to veterans and those willing to climb the steep learning curve.

Yes, other sims have offered training experiences but there’s no real sense of persistence in that experience. You do the lesson and you move on. That works for some people but many bounce of off it. Combine that with how modern game design works, with levels, unlockable abilities and gadgets and a gradually expanding skillset and you have simulation experiences that are oppositional to how the more average casual consumer experiences this kind of entertainment.

When I started playing career mode with its helpful tips in the top right corner, the persistence of creating a pilot with a reputation, money in the bank, and a growing set of specializations and certifications it was clear that the designers of this mode wanted to offer something that was approachable and accessible to gamers.

I want to be clear too that don’t look down my nose at the term gamer. I am one! I love all kinds of games. Some of those games are also simulators. I don’t need this guided experience and in some ways I find it stifling, but that’s just me. Putting myself into the position of someone new to the experience and I can see how career gives you structure, guides you through the process, and lets you learn and make mistakes along the way without any terribly harsh penalties.

Bugs, repetitiveness

That all said, this mode has some issues that I want to explore as well. Some of these are not easy to solve but let’s talk about them anyways because I think they are hurting what is otherwise a good experience.

This mode, like the rest of the sim, has plenty of bugs. Some of them are annoying like an incorrect understanding of flap speed tolerances on aircraft that are not the Cessna 172. Some aircraft are ok, while others will get dinged for going too fast for the flap setting while at very low speeds. I’ve also lost points during one of my checkrides for not following the taxi indicators because they told me to plow through a row of parked airplanes. That seemed wrong? Maybe it was just me! Another came up when I was in the hold short box but still got docked points for moving out of the box before getting permission.

Other bugs will stop you in your tracks. I’ve seen, though not experienced, parking spaces in places where you can’t park an airplane. One even had their aircraft not appear at all only later to find it sitting on the rooftop of the nearest building. I’ve seen videos of folks trying to spawn into their aircraft or helicopter only for it to spawn and drop from the sky onto the ground. Problematic to fly when the aircraft is sitting on its side.

The AI voiced dialogue is technologically a cool feature as the voices are not the worst that I’ve heard. They have a tinge of authenticity in speaking the names of the local area that you’re flying over as one example. On the other hand, they are so repetitive that the novelty wears off almost immediately. Fly a few sightseeing flights and you’ll be lamenting the commentary and the sameness of it. It’s one part endearing and about five parts irritating. I don’t really have any solutions because I get the design goal behind it – give the passengers in the back seat a bit of personality and make your flight feel like its actually something while enabling career mode to work all over the world. But they also feel like almost the same people every time despite obvious attempts at changing up the relationship of the passengers each time.

Even here it feels like the dialogue has not been fully quality tested. I’ve noticed some obvious spelling errors and others have found at least one instance where the AI voice just says “Placeholder.” I assume that was not taken out before the end of testing.

The design goals here are difficult with a desire for this mode to work at literally thousands of airports across the world. I’ve been to some familiar places and new places through the experience so far and I’m still just getting started. Making it work with such flexibility means accounting for a lot of difficult variables. Some of this feels a bit sloppy but some of it is a challenge to fix I’m sure. It just needs to be refined because I think the overall experience can be quite fun and despite the issues many are already enjoying it – myself included.

Career mode opens the door to answer a different question

If the career experience in MSFS 2024 has set out to give us things to do in the simulator, it’s only partially achieved that goal. It asks and then answers the question on how to make the sim more appealing to those who want a more guided experience – gamers, yes, but everyone who wants the kind of persistence of working your way through the piloting experience. On this point I think it’s doing well with more than a few commentators within the community reporting at just how much they enjoy this experience. Spawning into an airplane with no goal was not enough for them and this gives them purpose. Great!

But the other opportunity on offer here was to give all flight simmers things to do with the sim. Even those who don’t want the persistence features. If you want to jump in and have a very specific experience without the persistence, the pilot reputation, or the unlocks, you simply can’t right now. You have to progress, slowly at times, through the grind to get to what you want. That’s ok for some games but for a flight simulator the sandbox nature of it lends itself to not locking them away.

I know many who have commented that they wanted to hop in and be spraying agricultural crops around the world or flying a search and rescue mission. They don’t want to do the pilot unlock thing. They want to do the missions! And I feel that!

I wanted to hop into a DA62 and do the meteorological research mission chasing a tornado from the reveal trailer. I’m probably dozens of hours away from that experience right now.

Other community members have pointed out similar challenges with the design and have called for a sandbox mode with all of the missions and experiences unlocked and available. There’s a lengthy thread on the MSFS forums here with people upvoting this issue.

I want them to go a step further, however, because I still want to be able to do the career experience and work my way through. Instead, I want the missions to be available separately of that keeping career mode as it is and offering up the missions independently of it too! Combat flight simmers will know what I’m talking about when I say that I want the MSFS 2024 equivalent of IL-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles Advanced Quick Mission Builder and the same sim’s Career mode. Both autogen similar types of missions but one is part of a persistent experience with a single squadron and the other is something I can jump in and do on a whim.

I want to be able to say “I feel like doing some firefighting,” pick a spot on the map, and do it. More to that… I want to do all of this in multiplayer! I want to spend a night flying firefighting missions with friends. I want to scoop up water on a lake, try and get an accurate drop, and then watch my buddy fly in ahead of or behind me as they also try and take on the mission. That sounds like such a great time! It’s not yet here…. not yet anyways.

None of this is fatal

These problems are not “fatal” in that I don’t think Microsoft have backed themselves into a corner. The core fundamentals are good, in some cases the execution is good, but there are bugs and niggly problems that are getting in the way of having a good time.

I feel like this sim could have used more months of testing and quality assurance before it went out. There’s so much that’s great about MSFS 2024 and perhaps calling it that helped lock their marketing team into a desire to launch before the end of the year. Or maybe it was driven by quarterly earning reports. Whatever it was, MSFS 2024 is feeling rough and especially so in this new career and mission experience.

Will it get fixed? Yeah! I think it will! The track record of Microsoft and Asobo over the last four years has been one of continual refinement. What we had with MSFS 2020 when it launched in 2020 is a far cry to where it is now with virtually every aspect of that sim moving forward. MSFS 2024 will get there and even this somewhat flawed experience I can see getting the necessary polish to make it into a fantastic experience for new and veteran simmer alike.

I’m still just scratching the surface on MSFS 2024 as a platform. I will eventually write a complete review after I’ve poured more hours into the sim and evaluated it on all aspects but I wanted to write about career mode right now. There’s much to explore, a lot that’s good, some that is great, and some that needs more work.