Escort Missions = Suck

[justnotcricket]

They're not that bad, and often they are, if nothing else, an actual challenge as you rush to complete objectives while making sure your charge isn't being mutilated somewhere. I wouldn't, like, play a game that consisted *solely* of escort missions (variety is nice), but they're not the end of the world. Almost every game has at least one 'meh' mission/quest/level in it, and if done correctly, they can be as entertaining as anything else.

Curiously, the 'escort' missions that keep popping into my mind at the moment are the ones from Dynasty Warriors Extreme Legends on Extreme Mode or whatever it was called. You know, the ones where if you managed to escort the merchant to the end of the level you'd get an upgrade to your gold or iron or whatever. =D I remember one time when a friend and I co-op'd a game on Extreme Mode with only Sima Yi and Zhuge Liang. Man was that ever a challenge...

 

[Mechsoap]

dont know why but many escort missions in dead rising 2 has greatly improved, it isent as much a pain to carry people back

 

[Lyx]

The AI may be an easy scapegoat, because it often is what escalates the problem - but i do not think that it IS the problem itself.

Rather, as the OP hinted, i think the problem is that traditional escort missions make the escort objective useless - they're just dead weight - oh wait, no, dead weight wouldn't be as bad. Rather, its like voodoo: The player gets a puppet which enemies can attack, with damage automatically translating to player-"damage". How could one like THAT?

Escorts become interesting, when the escorted one isn't a poor helpless damnsel in distress, but rather something useful to you. For example, lets take a space shooter - lets say you're escorting cruiser and some supply ships, to invade a planet - en route, you are attacked by interceptors. Now, the cruiser can provide useful help in repelling the attack, and may help you with repairs and stuff, and the supply ships will in the overall campaign supply you with stuff. Suddenly, it doesn't feel anymore like you got a deadweight voodoo puppet - you're not "escorting" something useless incompetent - you're simply a reinforcement that is meant to deal with special types of threats more efficiently than the others alone.

 

[bak00777]

I hate Escorts, they seem like a waste of my time. they are all either too easy, or hard and annoying.

 

[Beryl77]

If I could delete something from games it would be escort misssions. I remember playing an escort mission in Fable where I had to rescue a child. While I was killing some enemies, he had nothing better to do than running straight to the evil monsters. So I had to run to him and kill them before they killed him, while some Hobbes where chewing my ass. Just because of that little brat I had to redo this mission several times.