Let me name some of my favorite games:

Only slightly adjusted to fit my point

• Rule The Waves 3
• IL2 - Battle of Stalingrad
• Dirt - Rally 2
• ArmA
• My Summer/Winter Car

What do these games have — yes of course it's that they have career modes, either natively, implied or community made. In Rule The Waves 3, you play as the grand (imortal) admiral of a nation, in Dirt Rally 2, you play as a up-and-coming rally driver. In ArmA, you can play in a group where you get a rank, medals, awards, roles, etc.

Todays problems

Games length

There are generally two camps regarding how long games are:

Games today are too bloated and stretched. They are just padded with boring busywork to drag out playtime.

And

I just spent a lot of money on this game, and I finished it in just a couple of days, it feels like I wasted my money.

Here is where career modes excell, you don't get a game with cutscenes seperated with gameplay, where the amout of gameplay between cutscenes will always make someone angry. Instead you get to frame the gameplay as the story. These games are generally longer and more padded than games with a conventional story, this however is more honestly communicated to the player before purchase.

Pacing

Similar to length, pacing is a matter of strong opinions. Either the game has unsatisfying progression, or it dripfeeds the player, and there is rarely a universally accepted middlepoint. When you have a linear progression with specific bosses, upgrades and difficulty, you often alienate either side of your audience. Career modes often grants the player more options regarding their pacing. Instead of having a linear lines of races/battles/bosses, allowing the player to choose themselves, along with setting their own difficulty within character, solves this issue.

Immersion

Stories are great, my favorite game yet is Kingdom Come - Deliverence 1 and 2. Setting them in some simulated procedual story would spoil it completely. What makes KCD so great is how intertwined the story is to the gameplay, and how easy it is to do something else for a bit. You can easily focus on smithing, treasure hunting, completing sidequests, etc. However, other genres have a harder time for this.

Racing games mostly suffer from bad stories and/or poor immersion. Let's start with NFS, the latest game, NFS Unbound, has a poor story, however with a decent gameplay loop. You have a two stage gameplay loop, day and night. You get a unique set of races for each, with each granting cash in exchange for increasing heat. You choose which races you want not based on if you can be bothered, but if you dare increase heat more, especially during daytime, since it passes on to night.

Dirt Rally 2 has the opposite problem, there is no real story, however unlike in Unbound where you go from race to race in a open world, avoiding police and pushing your luck with heat trying to get the biggest payout. In Dirt, you just use menus. I hate menus, it ruins immersion and brings me out of the game, which sucks because Dirt is super immersive while actually driving.

Just having some setdressing hiding the fact that you are just starting a time trial works wonders. In IL-2, the menus are setup in a way to make the player feel like they are a pilot in a barrack. You can read the newspaper, you get a list of missions for the day, you can get called into random defence missions inbetween them. In Dirt, you simply press career mode, select which of the current championships you want to play, and just jump in. Boooooring

Roleplay

Continuing on from Immersion, being able to make your own choices and having your own motivations enables roleplaying, which in turn improves immersion. The main way to achieve this is the reframe choices (in all forms) as choices of the players charachter. This is where Rule The Waves 3 excells, you don't play as a nation, you play as the admiral, you can only advice politicians, but if they increase or lower your budget is still random. You can use your influence to increase/decrease tensions with other nations, but sometimes you are just at the mercy of a pacifist/jingoist parlament. Even though the game looks like Excel 2006, I get fully immersed in it in a way that Read Dead Redemption 2 couldn't achieve.

Multiple progression threads

A quite popular progression setup is having two threads, mostly cash and reputation. I like this setup, since it allows the player to set their own pace and difficulty naturally. Do you want to grind your gear, or move forward in the story? Nothing stops you from having more, you can add time for example as a way to force the players hand (if that makes the game better!)

NFS Heat uses reputation and cash pretty well, Unbound uses cash and time, which I am slightly unsure about but it works (you generally rush to get a car good enough for the next championship, with customization being a drain on that).