To people like me as a user story and career modes in simulation software is a complete waste of development budget.
I want in simulation software utmost realism and a direct connection to engineering.
Now when we are talking about other games (if one has still some time for them nowadays) I LOOOOOOOOVE and in some cases even DEMAND a good story mode as that story is what makes the game.
RPG games for me traditionally are such games - I have absolutely no clue whatsoever what a Fallout game without NPC driven story could possible be useful for and wouldn't touch it ever.
I would for example LOOOOOOOVE a story driven RPG of the quality of one of the Bethesda or Square Enix RPGs completely around motor racing with cross platform plugins into racing simulations.
Say one day you could spend all your time in a story driven RPG experience around research and development of a certain new car component with a little bit of a side story of love and drama of the race engineer you are playing, the next day you would be at the Paul Ricard test track (you could play as the racing teams truck driver and drive that big rig all the way from Stuttgart to the Paul Ricard racetrack).
Having arrived at the track you could play as a security guard, hacking, slashing, karate chopping those pesky Ferrari Ninja spies away from the trailer where they aim to get their greasy fingers on Porsche's latest tech ahead of the season opener.
The next morning you could do some management as the teams racing director, getting all horses in line, managing the teams test days, then putting your race suit on playing as the driver, jumping into the 2019 911 GT3 R to put some test kilometers onto the data logging device only to download and analyze the data properly, playing as the telemetry engineer and discussing setup changes with the head mechanic, …
At some point one would have to play the helicopter pilot who would shuttle a new prototype part from Zuffenhausen to the local airport, where you take over as an Uber driver having to break chase to a team of motorcycle hooligans, armed with Uzi sub machine guns, trying to get to the trunk of that old BMW M5 you are driving (guess these guys were hired by a small team out of Switzerland which just switched to Lamborghini customer racing machines and need that inside detail on the new Porsche parts), …
pure racing sim heaven.
NOW THAT would be a story mode I would care for - if the core sim would use the very best plugin software solutions for each of those experiences instead of trying hard to be mediocre at many things (Project Cars comes to mind) one would experience the very best of everything.