Why are escort mechanics hated?

[Jick Magger]

Thank you for your thoughts, everyone. This has been very helpful.

(goes on to design a game that is one big escort quest)

Konami's way ahead of you.

 

[J1M]

Escort quests are hated because they are not fun.

Compare and contrast your typical escort quest with a game like Republic Commando.

 

[WhiteGuts]

Timed underwater escort mission while dodging underwater mines and managing O2 bars. What's not to love.

 

[wwsd]

It seems clear from this that most people don't object to the concept of escort missions, just the execution, and this is mostly AI-related. Because many otherwise good games have no AI worth speaking of, nor worthy of the name "intelligence". So the only challenge of these escort missions consists in manipulating the AI around rocks and other objects, and the player is constantly aware that he is doing so, so there is neither merit nor immersion in it. Combine that with the fact that these quests sometimes feel like they were added in the last minute to pad out the game so the publishers can boast hundreds of interactive, immersive quests or whatever.

 

[GewuerzKahn]

I guess it's because of pacing that I don't like escorting or following people in games. The game just goes into auto-scrolling mode that limits your movement and speed.
The escort mechanic in Bioshock 3 is cheap, but it doesn't interrupts the pace of boring gameplay.

 

[Fug]

I can't stand the escorts in Dragons Dogma where the escort doesn't fight or doesn't run away from monsters. At least when you escort Ser Bern, Mercedes, and other knights they fight things fairly well, but escorting merchants or civilians is fucking awful.

 

[Xathrodox86]

Because they're dull and usually half assed. Escort missions are like sewer missions - a kind of filler-type quests, when the devs got a sudden brain fart and can't creat anything new and original.

 

[Grimgravy]

If escort missions played more the "The Hunted" in team fortress classic they wouldn't suck so much. Of course that required a decent brain behind the person being escorted.

 

[Rabbid]

All the npcs that ask me to escort them in Tales of MajEyal die brutally.

ToME has the best escort witness quests!

 

[Beastro]

Bad AI shits on player agency and all the more so if there's zero ability to heal your escort.

Often they just degenerate into trial and error where you get lucky on the hits the escort.

I ran into much the same problem killing the ratking for the first time with the help of the Camp Hathor people in Underrail. The way the fight starts, the main Camp guy (who you need to live to complete the quest) is at the front and totally exposed so on the first turn he's hovering at 20% health, then heals to 80% and will die in the next unless you did something to keep the enemies attention focused onto yourself or CC them. Having lacked good CC and the fight being in close quarters ruining the ability to use flashbangs and such, things degenerated into me hoping for a quick initiate roll, then running into the middle of the fray with my weak sniper and hoping I survived the opening enemy attacks that often resulted in the ratking one shotting me.

That and any other quest in that game that involves a fight that requires someone to survive kills the fun mood of having support in a big battle and enjoying not being the central target of everyone for a change.

Escort missions should remove the bloody defence target and allow you to clear ahead with some finite disposable backup that makes things very hard once they're gone, that way you get the benefit of someone else following you around without the make or break crap that's beyond your control.

That or the escort being in a support role in the back providing something like art support and being vulnerable if you get outflanked, but not something shoved into the center of combat that takes damage like a bullet sponge when that's not it's purpose, it's yours.

 

[Jick Magger]

It also doesn't help when the escort mission does not suit the genre your game is. The Emma escort missions for MGS2 that was mentioned above is an example of this, though I think the worst parts of it (i.e. the timed underwater swimming) were more due to MGS2's rather crippling overreliance on gameplay gimmicks. I personally think that the EVA escort segment at the end of MGS3 was also pretty bad. You have to sneak through three stages where all of the guards are in permanent caution status (meaning they're aware you are there and are always actively searching for you, instead of just passively patrolling the area), and some are even camouflaged and are waiting in ambush.

Now this level would be a fairly difficult one if you're just on your own, but you also have to deal with escorting the female lead of the game through the area. She's been wounded, so moves at a snail's pace, needs to be constantly fed to ensure her stamina stays up and her rumbling stomach and whining about hunger doesn't alert nearby guards, and has a bit of a delay in her movements, meaning if you begin crawling, she'll take a half second to start doing it herself, which is enough time for a guard to notice her and raise the alarm.

You have a rudimentary command system of wait/follow, but if you wander too far away for too long, she'll eventually come out of her hiding spot to try and find you. You can tranq her and try to clear the area out on your own, but she talks in her sleep, which alerts nearby guards. You can knock her out by punching her in the face or throwing her to the ground, which stops her from talking in her sleep, but that lasts for a few minutes at most, and all of your codec team give you shit for it.

So the end result is that we've got a stealth game, where the player has spent the majority of time sneaking on their own and have probably gotten used to that idea, and at the absolute last minute (this segment is the last actual sneaking part of the game, after this is the final boss and around 20 minutes worth of cutscenes) they throw a lead weight around your neck and force you to do it with an escort that is constantly making noises. You're not fucking up because you're bad at the game, you're fucking up because the game is screwing you over.

 

[The Decline]

Dragon's Dogma escort quest solution:

Travel to destination
Drop portcrystal
Teleport back to Gran Soren
Accept quest
Teleport to destination
Quest finished

 

[Norfleet]

RE4 is Escort Mission: The Game, however it does said escorting pretty well with a few parts being extremely frustrating. The part where you have to use a crank for the stairs in the castle comes to mind. However it does this by making your escort follow directly behind you, ducks and moves out the way when you aim your gun in her direction, has a wait/follow command, and there are safe places where you can just drop her in. Which accordings to your view does not count as a escort mission.

Well, it's not really an escort mission if you can just park your escortee in your base and clear the map before moving it. I'm sure the annoying parts are where these points broke down and it became The Escort Mission.

Escort mission - the game.

I think that this point you're not so much playing an Escort Mission in a regular game as you are playing a variant on Lemmings. There's a reason they give us a button to Kill Them All in frustration.

You have a rudimentary command system of wait/follow, but if you wander too far away for too long, she'll eventually come out of her hiding spot to try and find you. You can tranq her and try to clear the area out on your own, but she talks in her sleep, which alerts nearby guards. You can knock her out by punching her in the face or throwing her to the ground, which stops her from talking in her sleep, but that lasts for a few minutes at most, and all of your codec team give you shit for it.

This sounds like something calculated to annoy you in every possible way. At this point it's not even bad escort mission design, it's intentional developer trolling.

 

[Major Malfunction]

But the rise of the "escort quests suck" stuff came from WoW and it doesn't happen in MMOs much anymore. Now you force the NPC to follow the player (in AoC (I should say the expansion cause AoC has some fucking awful escort quests in the vanilla content) we used the pet system actually) at their pace and when you reach the right trigger then quest over.

Reputation/honor grinding in Ultima Online could be done by escorting nobles, but that was a cakewalk. If you had the runes and the magicks you could just gate them to their destination, meaning you'd occasionally run into a character towing 50 or so nobles like a flock of hens and then dumping them at Britain bank where they'd cause a ruckus. With a new character the escorts had a different utility, as you could get yourself a few with decent equipment and have them tank for you in dungeons. Getting a noble killed meant a rep/honor penalty and a bit of low-tier loot. WoW was such a shit game, basically the worst design decisions from f2p mmo's combined into a single package.

I think that this point you're not so much playing an Escort Mission in a regular game as you are playing a variant on Lemmings. There's a reason they give us a button to Kill Them All in frustration.

Probably had more to do with them getting permanently stuck in the environment.

 

[Perkel]

AI, AI never changes...

Escort missions WOULD be fun in most games if AI was up to snuff, especially if you are talking about escort mission in which escorted person isn't bulletproof like now for most games "escort" means.