I'm becoming slightly concerned (perhaps unnecessarily) that there is an underlying danger here in how long these big ship missions will take, especially if they become 2 parters.
I loved the hell out of the original X-Com games, but there were 2 things that I really didn't like. The first was missions that lasted too long because the maps were too large with too many tiny places for aliens to hide (I'm looking at you ship terror mission). I think Chris has done a great thing by adding the alternative mission objective to avoid these, and I hope they will exist even on the two parters.
However the second thing was that stage at the late game where you had all the items you needed to research, but were just waiting for however long it took to research and manufacture the final stuff. In this time you ended up with quite a few large UFO's flying around that you then had to clear out when you downed them. This became incredibly tedious after a while. In Apocalypse you could at least destroy the ship entirely on the overworld map which I thought was a good solution.
I guess what I'm getting at with this is that if the large UFO missions are going to be really long slogs, they either need to be really varied, or somehow skippable (this problem has arisen in the new X-Com game, with reviewers asking for the ability to auto-resolve battles). I totally understand that we won't be able to make our own breaches in the UFOs for technical reasons, but if thereis no variety in how we can tackle the large UFOs each time I think it could get dull. Because of this I'm getting more convinced by the idea ducttape had, or just a 1 part mission inside the UFO.
If there are two part missions, how do you see the positioning setup of the second stage going? I always found it irrating in Apocalypse where your squad would just start randomly across the map. At least there though you could arrange people in squads that would appear together.
I'd also be interested to see if people have ideas of how to keep those final missions interesting.