Or am I just screwed? I don’t like em, I don’t want to do em and I want to skip em. Is there any way to do this?
Specifically I want to skip the flight school missions. I did the first 2 easily enough but turning the plane is just an exercise in idiocy. I love the game and would like to finish it, but I have absolutely zero interest in learning to fly using their flight control system or flight model.
I am playing the PC version, with no hacks, mods or cheats. Pure vanilla.
I looked on Gamefaqs with no success - there are various methods to cheat to improve flight skill, or to slow the game down etc, but nothing to to get me past these flight missions. And its not a matter of needing to learn it etc: I don’t want to.
I’d hate for this to end the game for me, it sure seems like theres a lot of good gameplay left that doesn’t involve the worst flight system I’ve ever seen. Any help?
Ditto the god damn swimming requirement-mission. Been stuck on that one for ages since I don’t feel like wasting an evening powering up a skill like its some badly balanced action RPG.
I got past the swimming stuff without much trouble. It only takes 10 or 15 minutes of swimming, once you know the controls. Go swimming, then hit the LMB or left CTRL to dive. While diving you can hit W (or up-arrow) plus Shift to swim forward. Swimming forward is not necessary, you will get lung capacity increases just for diving. Go to a safe spot and dive for 10 minutes. That should be enough to let you initiate the mission. It’s actually a very cool mission.
Well I can’t find any way to skip these missions. I even looked around on some of the seedier websites for trainers and hacks but there is apparently no mod, hack or trainer that lets you just skip (or win) a mission, which seems like an oversight given the vast hate of flying of missions.
I’m probably not going to go on, I just loathe the flying too much. Sad really, b/c otherwise this is a fantastic game.
Yep. It’s the biggest, ugliest example of the huge flaw in that game’s design: R* is infatuated with their own genius. They make a huge game, with so much to do, but you have to do it all. This kind of game should be designed to facilitate the player having fun doing whatever part of the game they find fun; instead, R*, being utterly convinced of their own genius, assume that everything they do is gold, and that you’d be crazy to not want to do ten flight missions in a row.
Other examples of this:
being forced to race a muscle car through the woods early on.
not being able to disable that auto-load that happens when you turn the game on.
This is (partly) why it amazes me that people consider the GTA series some kind of paragon of open-ended gameplay. It really isn’t. Sure, you can just run around and shoot people all day, and ignore the missions, but you can do that in Fable too, and nobody has any problem realizing that Fable was very linear. The missions in GTA follow a very tight sequence, you have no choices of what missions to do, and barely any choices of when to do them, and very, very few are optional. And you have to do crap like Flight School, even if it’s extremely difficult for you, even if it has really nothing to do with the rest of the game, even if it’s not fun in the least, and even if your brother ends up beating it for you.
You guys aren’t alone. In fact there’s even a term to describe you as a group:
Weaksause
I don 't know what games you’re used to playing but normally to actually win a game you’ve got to, you know, be good at it. All of it. Now I’m just poking a little fun at your expense but c’mon if you’re not even willing to learn the mechanics of play then the game ends for you here. It’s not asking for mastery. You’ve gotten as far as the flight school missions so you’ve already unlocked the entire map and are close to the end of the game. Congratulations.
If you haven’t tried already I would heartedly suggest flying in first person mode as it makes navigating 100x easier. Also if you’ve been using the mouse and keyboard try a gamepad or joystick for the time being.
As for swimming I think it took me about 5 minutes just swimming around the water a bit before I got my skill high enough to continue. Try an MMORPG for a real grind.
Yeah, the swimming was no big deal at all. What’s ten minutes of screwing around for a bit when you’re going to be playing this game for so many hours?
But the flight school missions straight-up sucked, at least in the PS2 version. First-person view or not. It fucking sucked. Good thing the rest of the game is so great, or I would have quit at the flight lesson where you have to fly through the circle of rings and then land.
Flying isn’t a basic mechanic of the game, though. There are like three times as many Flight School missions as there are other missions that require you to fly. It’s pathetic. And it’s not fun.
The flying missions are much easier if you can manage to raise your flying skill up before doing the missions. It’s been awhile, but I remember there being a biplane on a mountain in the boonies that I used to get some skill and skills.
It’s not some sort of macho primate dominance “I am a he-man b/c I can fly a video game” thing for me. I play games that I enjoy, for entertainment. I like 99% of GTA, but the flying sucks. I don’t enjoy it, I’d like to skip it. I have no ego invested in it, and I don’t care if you call me a weaksauce or whatever. If calling people names based on their entertainment preferences makes you feel better about your obviously inadequate sense of accomplishment in life, feel free :).
But honestly, I’d really like to see the Las Venturas part of the game (plus i assume there’s a “Return to Los Santos” vengeance type moment that I’d also like to play through). And right now, the flying is hanging me up.
It appears that there is no code, hack, mod or cheat that will help me. Therefore I’ll accept a save game just after the flying school if someone has one. PM to email it to me, I’d appreciate it.
Someone said there is one more flying mission right after the flight school so a save game after that is good. Then apparently theres a really tough flight mission later. Not sure how to handle that. Maybe I just need a save game after that point? Are there many missions in between that would get skipped?
If someone can help me out I would appreciate a PM.
Sorry, but I don’t have the PC version, and my only PS2 save is after I’ve beaten the entire game.
However, about future flight missions… I honestly think the flight school was far tougher than any of the later missions that require flying. The one exception I can remember is “Supply Lines”, which is a bonus mission you need not complete to finish the game. (Plus, if you search here on “supply lines gta” or something similar, I bet you could find a thread that discusses an easy way to beat that mission.)
I just remember loving 99% of the game, and absolutely hating one of the flight school lessons beyond belief. That’s how much more difficult it was than the rest of the game in its entirety.
There are actually two or three hard flight missions right after flight school. There is one plane flying mission after that IIRC, but it’s easy… you just take off and fly straight for a little bit. No loop-de-loops and stuff. So the save you want is right after the missions right after flight school.
According to the Gamefaqs walk through I want a save right after the N.O.E. mission and also after the Freefall mission. Those are the only mandatory flight missions after flight school from what I can tell: the other flight missions IIRC are optional.
If someone has a semi-decent save after either of these missions, I’d appreciate a PM - I would like to play out the game.
There’s also Vertical Bird, which is very, very hard if you don’t like the flying. It’s a lot harder than Freefall, which is really easy as long as you’re banking as soon as the mobster plane shows on radar. And it can’t be skipped, since it leads directly to a major plot point.
Saves really aren’t going to help you. If you just can’t handle the flying, honestly, I’d bag the game. But before doing that, try some different approaches. I also found first-person a help. IMO, flying is a good addition to the game, although the initial learning curve is way too steep.
Sent an email with some saves attached. PM me if they’re okay/work/whatever. Think these will get you past the flying missions, but not completely sure as I didn’t load the game to double check (I do that and I’ll be sitting here for six hours…). I’ve got more if you need them.
Sorry, but the fact that flying is necessary for about a dozen missions including the flight school tests indicates pretty strongly that it is a basic mechanic of the game. You might not like it, but them’s the facts.
And it is fun, if you keep at it. It opens up some neat transportation options later in the game. I also wish Rockstar had implemented it better, but I still think the game is better with flying that it would have been without it.
Sorry, but the fact that flying is necessary for about a dozen missions including the flight school tests indicates pretty strongly that it is a basic mechanic of the game. You might not like it, but them’s the facts.
Flying missions make up maybe 5% of the total gameplay experience. That’s hardly enough to qualify for a basic mechanic of the game.
No matter how you slice it, making these missions mandatory for completing the story was an incredibly stupid move.
Sorry, but the fact that flying is necessary for about a dozen missions including the flight school tests indicates pretty strongly that it is a basic mechanic of the game. You might not like it, but them’s the facts.
And it is fun, if you keep at it. It opens up some neat transportation options later in the game. I also wish Rockstar had implemented it better, but I still think the game is better with flying that it would have been without it.[/quote]
There are like a hundred and forty missions in that game. Thirteen of them involve flying, and ten of those are just supposed to teach you how to fly.
And it’s not fun. Not for me. If you enjoyed it, great; I didn’t, and I’m clearly not alone, so they should have been optional.
