Escort Missions Suck

[Girlysprite]

Oh while I was ranting on oblivion anyways...

They double fucked up the duke's son escort mission. Ok...at some point you just have to accept the fact that he will get himself killed. Sigh. So, what happens when he dies? The quest updates and says 'get his ring'.

So what happened every time? The guy sees a monster on the bridge, charges and gets knocked off. *ping* quest update: get the ring!. I look into the lava.
No fucking way.

That was one of the poorest quest designs ever.

 

[ccesarano]

My brother and I just played Halo 3 last night, and they sort of had an escort mission in there. You had to help get a couple Warthogs through a building, opening one gate after the next. The bonus is you can go on ahead, destroy all the enemies and then open the gate for the Warthogs to get through. It was possible for the Warthogs to be destroyed, but it didn't send you back. You just didn't have Warthogs available for the next area, which is a huge, pretty much all-vehicle portion of the map. Once again, though, it's possible to get through it without vehicles.

In the end, it's very loosely an escort mission, but it is possible.

Aliens vs. Predator 2 also had something like this, only you were moving the Armored Car through, and your reward for opening the gate was it blasted the Hell out of all the aliens.

I think an escort mission could also be done well if it's not a central objective, but if you lose your escortee you are disadvantaged.

 

[ANeM]

I liked how COD4 handled its escort mission (One Shot, One Kill)
For starters, the character being escorted had some development prior to the escort. He had some good dialog and had saved my ass in some situations. In this he had become a character I would want to save.

Too some extent he was similar to Alyx in Episode 1, although Alyx simply isn't an escort mission, she can for the most part handle herself. She follows at some parts, but at others she leads. She is a AI partner, not an escortee. You never really had to save her.

McMillian on the other hand was an escort mission, taking a somewhat different approach to the stay/follow escort system

The problem with the normal formula for a stay/follow system is that the escortee is always so damned stupid and helpless that for the most part its just easier to have him stay where he is, clear through the level and then walk all the way back and get him (Something I found myself doing during the Rainbow Six: Vegas escorts) which really just eliminates the reason for having the mission and instead creates needless backtracking

However, as I already said, McMillian wasn't helpless. The problem he had was he couldn't move. When set down (in the Stay position) McMillian would cover you while you engaged enemies and could not die. However when you picked him up (the follow position) both you and him were effectively helpless. Slow moving and without the use of your weapons, should an enemy catch you off guard he could take both of you out.

It was just refreshing from the usual "I'm the leader, I always fighting. You are the follower follower, you're always helpless"

 

[beoweasel]

Oh while I was ranting on oblivion anyways...

They double fucked up the duke's son escort mission. Ok...at some point you just have to accept the fact that he will get himself killed. Sigh. So, what happens when he dies? The quest updates and says 'get his ring'.

So what happened every time? The guy sees a monster on the bridge, charges and gets knocked off. *ping* quest update: get the ring!. I look into the lava.
No fucking way.

That was one of the poorest quest designs ever.

I dunno, I never had that problem, I managed to complete that quest without losing either the elf or his buddy.

Escort quests are a pain in the ass, I really hate them, but on the flip side, I tend to dislike timed events even more. I hate being rushed, and nothing burns me like having to get to Point A from Point Z which are crawling with baddies, all the while a timer is slowly ticking away.

 

[The Gil-Monster]

The first Manhunt game had two escort missions that weren't pains in the keister. Quite the opposite, actually.

Final Fantasy XI Online, though, has one of the worst. There's a low-level idiot in the city of Bastok who wants to investigate the Dangruf Wadi, and he's so psycho to prove his mettle that he'll kill everything in sight regardless of what his hit points are.

Oh, but you can't help him- you see... he doesn't KNOW it's an escort mission- his sister asks you to watch him. So he whines and leaves if he but sees you, and you get to start all over again.

And all for a lousy 1K in cash.

Next.

 

[Seaforce]

I think this comes down to the same thing a lot of other gaming elements fall prey to, just with a lower success rate and a much more tedious result; lack of originality. Take, for example, the Twilight Princess mission where you had to escort the wagon across the plains. They put you on horseback, gave you an entire arsenal to work with, put the wagon at a speed that would match Epona's normal pace while allowing you to easily catch up by sprinting or cutting a diagonal, and replaced a generic healthbar with a fire meter. The way it was designed, it stayed fast paced while letting you distance yourself from the wagon as long as you picked off or distracted a relatively slow but steady stream of enemies. To me, this wasn't tedious at all, and I've yet to fail once (though not for lack of effort or alertness). I'm willing to bet that a good deal of effort was put forth to design the field, enemy points, and just about everything else involved favourably so that it would be fair, even if it meant throwing AI to hell and making the NPC follow a set path.

By stark contrast, though I suppose this isn't technically an escort mission, I remember playing a Lord of the Rings game a while back in which the final mission was to defend a door against an entire horde of monsters essentially by yourself (and I can only assume that this was the result of you being practically invincible at this point and the designers being too lazy to balance the difficulty). And that's all they did; there was no attempt to change any element of gameplay at all. The door had a health bar that decreased relatively quickly, and once it was gone you were dead. Doesn't seem like they put much thought into that.

It seems to me that Fable made a similar mistake, not changing enemy mannerisms or doing something innovative and unexpected. Instead there was a completely unmodified AI that ran headlong into the goblin bum-rape zone or your swinging radius while crying for his mommy the whole damned time. Essentially what I'm getting at is that a lot of game developers seem to think that if you jam a system fine tuned for one method of gameplay into another it won't result in any problems. At this point it should be blatantly obvious that it will.

Even something as simple as being able to command an NPC to sit tight in a safe-zone while you clear out the area of enemies would be a godsend (if developers are too damned lazy to do their jobs and think of something new), but the same thing is done over and over again and people hate it just as much, with the exception of aforementioned cases in the rest of the thread.

Getting into an entirely new but related region, I believe this is why games such as Portal and Super Mario Galaxy succeed so admirably. All of the industry standards that have been polished to a mirror shine are there at the game's core, but there are new and innovative aspects that make up for and ultimately attempt to suppliment those faults. This is also probably why games that depend on gimmicks (Red Steel, anyone?) tend to fail so miserably, because they supply plenty of new elements but have none of the already polished ones to back them up. This is something like trying to survive on vitamins and suppliments without ever eating food.

Anyway, I think I've driven my point into the ground now and am starting to get off track, so I'll shut up now.

 

[wellington]

Escort missions do suck and Ico doesn't change that. The reason is that Ico is an escort game and was designed from the ground up as such(I understand there are versions where she is more proactive). However the escort mission is an intrusion into game flow, an intrusion which works counter to the structure of most games that include them. The upside is that escorts can be a delightful window into just how bad AI programming can be in some games.

 

[L4Y Duke]

There was one escort mission that didn't suck too much for me.

It was one mission in GTA:SA, "Outrunner" I think it was called. It was the one where you shot apart the roadblocks so that the drugs van could get through.

Now, you see that one worked because:

1. All the threats to the escorted target were stationary, and as such you didn't need to worry about pursuers.
2. You were a lot faster than the van, so you could take out a roadblock well before the van reached it.
3. You were given the guns needed to blow the living daylights out of the roadblocks at the start of the mission.

Then again, the Resident Evil 4 escorting segments weren't that bad either. Ashley would stay behind you and to the left, whilst the camera was behind you and to the right, she would duck if you aimed through her (and she wasn't ducking already, or didn't have the bulletproof costume on) and what's more, you could get her to hide, if a hiding spot was close by.

 

[Chis]

Surprised no-one has mentioned Bioshock yet. It's latter fifth/quarter (whatever) is regularly criticised, and I have to wonder if that's mostly down to that **sock in mustard** little sister escort level!

Loved the rest of the game, though.

Except the endings. Yahtzee is on the money with them.

 

[[HD]Rob Inglis]

Hate everything that has to do with escort missions. I've played many and they all sucked. Fable was by far the worst. My brother, not great at most games, failed the mission so many times that he started cussing and yelling and punching the computer screen. He's 19.

 

[nightmare_gorilla]

i kinda feel like going DUH!!! here. i don't think there's a gamer out there who hasn't gotten frustrated to the point of killing someone they were suposed to protect, heck in saints row i freaking blasted my own guys in the face with a shotgun every chance i got just so i could revive them and do it again after they wouldn't get in the dang car.

 

[GloatingSwine]

Surprised no-one has mentioned Bioshock yet. It's latter fifth/quarter (whatever) is regularly criticised, and I have to wonder if that's mostly down to that **sock in mustard** little sister escort level!

Worth pointing out though that the little sister escort is one of the better escort missions in gaming. The encounters are discrete and all happen at points when the LS is static, so you don't have to worry about where she's going whilst you fight, and you get time to set up some defences before the attacks come. It's actually more like a sequence of point defence missions rather than a escort mission.

 

[brazenhead89]

Fantastic article - touched upon something I've ALWAYS hated in games. I'm not going to turn around and say that all escort missions suck, some are done very well, but most coders seem to think that giving the rescued NPC inferior A.I creates the illusion of helplessness. Perhaps this is why the resistance escort mission in Half Life Episode 2 was fun - even though you went back and forth through the same area multiple times, the A.I was clever, so much so that it seemed that the character's agendas were actively coded into the game - "We're here now, we need to be over there, let's get there quickly and smoothly". A highly memorable mission. Also, much as Ashley's typically squeeky, dopey voice made me want to just ditch her at the hands of the zombies, I never resented escorting her half as much as I thought I would.
Dead Rising's escort missions, however, suck like a factory-fresh vacuum cleaner. When you meet any escortee, they're usually wimpering in the corner like a dying puppy. Give them a baseball bat, and all of a sudden safety isn't their priority, and they're more intent to just batter the shit out of every zombie they meet, before being totally surrounded and screaming for your assistance. Once I found out that you get two sets of experience points - one for finding the victims, and another for succesfully escorting them, I found myself just finding them for the experience points and then leaving them to die. In a real zombie invasion, anyone willing to sacrifice their own life and mine just to smack a few zombies in a futile fashion deserves to be eaten alive.
It seems that developers view escort missions as a pre-requisite, like a title screen or an options menu, and thus don't feel the need to put much effort into them. It's not that escort missions are immediately bad, just that nearly all developers don't bother implementing them properly. As everyone on this board has pointed out, they tread a thin line between fun and infuriating, it's just that the developer's can't seem to pull their fingers out.
Nighty night x

 

[Capt_Jack_Doicy]

not all escort missions are bad, in space sims they tended to be fun, the last couple of missions in Freespace 2 were amazing and they were all escort missions

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

I think there are ways escort missions could not suck.

1) Game does not END when your excortee dies, instead of "dying" have them be incapacitated, or dragged off (ala Ashlee) and you have to rescue them, or drag their inert body along with you, dropping it to lay down fire, or by healing them.
2) Chases, when all your enemies come from behind, rather than in front it can be much less frustrating. Your escortee runs ahead of you and completes tasks while you hold off the baddies.
3) Sniping. I've never been as annoyed when you have to protect someone by sniping people who threaten them.
4) Competance, when your escortee fights back, takes cover, and avoids your fire things are a lot less annoying. In many games (fable) the people you escort are not programmed to respond to your attacks, they are not aware that the swing radius of a hammer is as wide as it is, this problem needs to be solved.
5) No "Friendly Fire", its unrealistic, but if the AI is not smart enough to know where your shooting (ex. Ashley in RE4 ducks out of your way when you shoot) they should not get damaged.
6) Toughness, the problem with a lot of escortees is that they take very few hits to kill, making it very annoying to keep them alive.
7) Multiple Defenses, you do not have to defend one target, you need to defend 10, but if 5 of them survive, your golden.
8) Allies, when your not the only one participating in the escort and not the only one who is shooting back, things get less annoying.

 

[Conqueror Kenny]

"Escort missions. They're like Take Your Child to Work Day, only your job involves getting shot at and your child is a mental deficient with a lousy sense of direction and giant target painted on his back." that's my opinion summed up instantly well done.

 

[Raikone]

I just have one thing to say. In Resident Evil 4 you basically escorted Ashley around and I found it worked pretty well. You could tell her to stay, follow or hide those three simple commands made it really easy to keep her alive.

 

[BallPtPenTheif]

CoD 4 actually had some really impressive team AI. The whole game was basically an extended "follow" variation of the escort mission, but it worked extremely well.

They kind of cheated though, don't you think? Their AI seems scripted rather than actual AI. You clear location A to location B and your team advances to the next choke point. Even after that, they seem almost invincible.. god knows how many times I've accidently bounced a grenade back into my own team just to see them take it in the grill piece like the brick shit houses that they are.