Grab-box of suggestions for AE

Logo contacts

Turn the in-game logos (PPD, Vanguard etc.) into items that can be used as contacts for the AE missions. This would suit impersonal "briefing style" mission introductions.

Yes/No choices on keywords

Allow negative searches on keywords ("return only matches where this keyword is not set.) Either add yes/no radio buttons to all the keywords, or use tick-boxes that cycle from empty to ticked to crossed out.

Change contact mid-arc

There's no real reason why the contact should remain the same throughout an arc -- that limitation is just a hold-over from the "quest-giver" mentality. Let us have the ability to change the contact upon mission completion. That would allow to us to make arcs where the progression seems more free-flowing. For instance: John Strobel sends you to investigate a Council base. Once there, you rescue several kidnapped scientists. One of the scientists then tells you about the super-weapon they had been forced to work on, and sends you off to destroy it. You don't find the super-weapon, but you find and defeat the officer in charge of the program, Cpt. Liebling. A little worse for wear, captain Liebling reveals where they've shipped the super-weapon as "there is no way you can stop it now!" You set out to prove him wrong. Once you've done so and the super-weapon is no more, you go back to John Strobel to tell him what happened.

Removable goals

Allow the completion of one goal to trigger the removal, as well as the addition, of other goals. This would add a lot of dynamism to missions. Not only could you choose which of several ways to complete a mission (defeat boss A or boss B?), but with some clever use you could have, say, an archvillain fight downgrade to a boss fight if you first destroy all the shield generators, or you could have the dialogue in the boss fight depend on whether you've completed an optional subgoal first.

Download arc data by mission

As I understand it, the main reason for the 100k limit to mission arcs is related to downloading it to the player's system. It would take a fair bit of work, but one solution to circumvent some of this would be to not send the whole arc in one go, but only send the data neccessary for the current mission (and download the data for the next mission in the background while you're playing the current one.) In other words, rather than <i>one</i> file of 100k for the whole arc, have <i>five</i> files of 100k, one for each mission in the arc.

Actually solid ideas here.

Should probably reword the title so people don't think it's another rant (that's what I thought when I clicked on it, I had my flamethrower ready just in case)