Is career mode too long? (2024)

What difficulty settings did you use? On my first career mode run I used 5 parts, unequipped mechs, and slow pilot progression. I had a maxed out assault lance around 900 days in. For last month or two I just flew around hitting other systems for the travel points.

For my next game I am also adding no rare salvage and stingy salvage.

I used the default, so 3 parts, unequipped, normal progression.

However, it's only partly that I ended up with too much time in the end game. There's also just the sheer number of missions. I went and took a look at the number of missions for the pilots and compared it to an old campaign save at 1184 days. The pilot from the campaign with the greatest number of drops was the leader at 76. In career mode that number was 204.
There's also a post campaign save I have that went to day 1774 before I didn't want to continue it—it has about 150 total missions, so it's also possible that 150 missions is about as far as I can go on a single run before I need something new given my comment about wanting to stop around day 900 under the new parameters.

I wonder how much of it is just that there is a score screen, a marked end point. If it hadn't been there, I probably would have just stopped when that set of mechwarriors was no longer interesting and started again, but because the end point was there, I felt like I was supposed to keep going. Maybe that will be the next option in the game configuration, so you can pick a short, normal or long career, which would have no effect other than changing the date the final score was tallied.

Short, medium and long goals sounds like a good idea. When I saw the 1200 days, my first thought was pass. I completed the campaign in 286 days and 32 missions. That's a very long way from 1200.

I can't say I have the same issue that a lot of people seem to have, in that they get bored when they become OP. I tend to try for assaults ASAP, and the same with gathering ++ weapons. I find I am what many consider OP much earlier than most people. So that's what I have the most experience playing. Bring on the 4v12 assaults.

I'm on the same settings as @Jade_Rook. I reached in principle full assault (I have an Orion that I use for LRMs) when I got my Cyclops Z at about 600 days so yeah, 1,200 feels like a bit long for how I play. It would probably be nice to have career length as an option in the difficulty sliders.

That said, that's going to change as we get more Flashpoint content and that content becomes more involved as HBS get used to playing around with it.

I felt that it was a good length when I was playing Ironman, 5 Pieces of Salvage, and Slow MechWarrior progression. I think this slows down the game just enough so that a player is just rolling into Assault Mechs near the end (depending on how aggressive they play).

Also, there is always the option to make your own rules and goals to help. Right now I am playing a solo career campaign (and as of this typing, doing badly), and posting it in another thread. It just adds a bit of flavor and interest for me until Urban Warfare launches.

Dmon said:

I think this question will change in relevance as more DLC is released. HBS do seem to be playing the very long game.

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“...the very long game.”

Hmm...

HBS does have a history of having multiple games in their development pipeline...

Hmm... : )

Is it too long or is it the way time is accounted for that is the issue?

I just started a game over the weekend and very quickly realized that time can actually stop. In the campaign every mission advances time by 1 day. This is not so in career mode. Time doesn't change unless you do it manually by pressing the play button on the Argo screen.

So assuming that you play multiple consecutive missions on one planet, then 5 missions in career mode could be 1 day whilst the same in campaign mode would be 5 days. So if the OP has too many days then perhaps he has spent to much time in one place where essentially time doesn't pass. I would note that this alone would make comparing time to play through and overall scores vary greatly depending on how many injuries, mech repairs you have to deal with.

I guess every ones mileage will vary. l like MeSooHaitYou am playing a solo mech start game and 600 days in I am still chasing my first medium mech. I am actually concerned I won't have enough time to post a half decent score. 5 mech parts makes a huge difference to game progression too.

Captain Slide said:

In the campaign every mission advances time by 1 day. This is not so in career mode.

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Time advanced in 1.2, not in 1.3. It has nothing to do with the mode.

Aradiel said:

Time advanced in 1.2, not in 1.3. It has nothing to do with the mode.

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Fair enough, I stand corrected, I haven't played since they changed it. That said I don't see the point in the change, particularly in career mode when the limiting factor is game time and you can effectively exploit it to get a very high number of missions in.

for me at 760+ hours i have more then a dozen playthrus under my belt and my shortest one was a bit over 1000 with most getting close to or a bit over 2000 days.

first time thru career mode i felt 1200 was to short and FPs came too early.
so i adjusted things to my liking 2000 days and delayed appearance of first flashpoint.

as with most anything in video games YMMV

Aradiel said:

Time advanced in 1.2, not in 1.3. It has nothing to do with the mode.

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Time not advancing was explicitly added to career mode because Kiva thought the game timer was too restrictive without it: apparently playtesters reported it as a bug when they first saw it.

I wasn't aware it applied to the campaign as well though. Is that confirmed?

Time not advancing was explicitly added to career mode because Kiva thought the game timer was too restrictive without it: apparently playtesters reported it as a bug when they first saw it.

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Really? There's nothing unreasonable about 1 day for 1 mission. The vast majority of campaign time is spent in travel, in the mech bay or in the med bay. Trimming a hundred days for a hundred missions is nit picking over pennies because chances are you're using those days to repair dents or heal auxiliary pilots anyway.

The real time killer is having maxed out Argo engines yet still having 14 day travel times between next door systems. Jump beacons are a hell of a drug.

Aradiel said:

It's easy to confirm. Just go do a mission. I have confirmed it myself. Now, whether or not that is intentional, or also a bug, no idea. I assume it's intentional.

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It is easy to confirm... if you're at your PC or have played a campaign game at all since Career Mode dropped. I am neither at my PC nor have I played a campaign game since 1.3 so if I want to know I'll have to wait and take time off doing other things to check,

That or ask the person who said it to confirm.

You seem trustworthy so that seems like a reasonable question.

bobucles said:

Really? There's nothing unreasonable about 1 day for 1 mission. The vast majority of campaign time is spent in travel, in the mech bay or in the med bay. Trimming a hundred days for a hundred missions is nit picking over pennies because chances are you're using those days to repair dents or heal auxiliary pilots anyway.

The real time killer is having maxed out Argo engines yet still having 14 day travel times between next door systems. Jump beacons are a hell of a drug.

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Jump points, not beacons: what is the point of being a fanboi if you can't be a pedant.

Cut travel times and weird though it sounds, you're cutting a significant part of the core hard-ish sci-fi aesthetic. It's a lot like the 'mech animations that new people to the franchise complained were too slow: they were clearly deliberately and very carefully chosen to be the pace they were and frankly still feel absolutely perfect to me and a lot of others.

As for cutting the deployment time... 1 day isn't unreasonable , but it's not like that time cost served any significant gameplay purpose. Kiva has a broad design philosophy of aiming to make decisions as clear and frictionless as possible, and I can entirely see her thinking "why are we waiting? How is this affecting or helping the decision space that I'm in as a commander?" and coming to the conclusion that it's doing nothing except being there for being there's sake.

In the end cutting it didn't feel jarring, I mean some people on this thread didn't even notice that it had happened, and it streamlines planning for Career Mode a little bit which in the end seems really reasonable.

Alarantalara said:

After starting on release day, I finished my first run of career mode today and I feel a bit worn out by it.
Based on my score, I completed 533 skulls worth of missions; assuming an average of 3 skulls per mission that's somewhere around 177 missions to reach the end point or about 60 hours given 20 minutes to do a mission.
In general, it was fun the entire time, but the last 300 days felt a lot like the 150 days before it: running random missions with a maxed-out lance. All the flashpoints were already completed, and so it was mostly a matter of marking time. While it was fun, I think I would be wanting to start all over again immediately if the final score had happened 15 hours (300 game days) earlier, whereas this leaves me wanting a bit of a break.

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I found career mode to be INCREDIBLY boring.

It's just a bunch of the samey missions on the samey maps, over and over.

I tried to use 5 parts and slow skill progression - but that was basically a HUGE mistake, as it just leads to more of the same.

AI is as dumb as ever.

Flashpoints were also a HUGE letdown. Granted, I haven't played all of them, but the last one I took was some escort mission, which was pretty much the same as other escort missions. Then I got an NPC Hatchetman. That mission was basically base defense, and as lame as they always are, with enemies LRMing one single building from multiple sides. When that's over there is a lame chat about Hatchetman being a prototype... and maybe I can get one later... I'd rather not, as I have 2 in storage already.

TBH this whole DLC was a huge waste of time. Still the same assault vs assault drudgery way too soon. My 4 guys vs their 2 assault lances. Meh.

Oh, but now I have a Cyclops to go with my lostech Atlas, lostech Highlander and King Crab.

As for cutting the deployment time... 1 day isn't unreasonable , but it's not like that time cost served any significant gameplay purpose

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It absolutely serves a purpose in creating a more consistent level of missions for the campaign. If there's only one guaranteed time sink (travel) then the meta devolves into as many missions as possible with as little travel time as possible. Hammer all the missions in 0 days, jump 15 days to the next planet, do it again and again and again for a 200+ mission campaign. That's a VERY long campaign, assuming a perfect mission record to limit mech and med bay use of course.

More diverse time sinks create tangible choices between flying or doing missions. As is every planet is essentially a flash point of missions.