Escort Missions Suck

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.

In theory, escort missions are your – as the hero/protagonist of a game – chance to demonstrate your ability to do more than simply kill everything in sight. Sometimes, there really are people who can’t defend themselves, yet need to venture forth into dangerous lands, and if you can save a world, you can surely save one person.

Unfortunately, no matter how much story is piled on top of these scenarios, the missions rarely feel like more than a chore, leaving you feeling less like the savior of the universe and more like a hired thug with little else to do but watch other people do more interesting, less violent work; the Blackwater mercenary of the videogame land, escorting pencil pushers to the Green Zone.

Escort missions, in a word, suck.

“Anyone with more than a few years of videogame experience can summon up a spirited and generally caustic opinion of this game mechanic given half the chance,” says Larry Sonntag, a reporter and longtime gamer. He describes his least favorite escort mission, a level from Peter Molyneux‘s critically acclaimed RPG, Fable, in which the hero is asked to enter a cave filled with monsters to recover a woman’s lost child, as “very unsatisfying, even annoying.”

Sonntag points to one of the main frustrations with this kind of scenario as he describes his attempt to save the child, and the child’s patent refusal to stand in a safe place while being protected.

“Every time I swung the hammer,” he says, “I’d both clean out some enemies and give a mighty smack to the young lad. Soon enough, my hammer reduced the boy to a bloody pile at my feet, and I walked across the room to turn off my Xbox.”

Sonntag’s experience is fairly common. Most players suffer through escort missions (often referring to them as “the dreaded”), unsure of why they’re even in the game. Even the designers and writers I spoke with for this article – many of whom have designed escort missions of their own – confess to a closet dislike of the convention.

“Like death, taxes, and a reformed .38 Special playing the state fair circuit, they’re something you just can’t get away from,” Says Richard Dansky of Ubisoft, a long time Clancy writer and designer, whose own escort missions can be found in the Ghost Recon installments Desert Siege and Island Thunder.

“The player’s failure gets predicated on something they can’t control,” says Dansky, “namely, the fact that the escortee has the self-preservation instincts of a cruller at a police precinct, and so there’s the endless rounds of ‘I did everything right, but I still failed.'”

And few of us play games to experience the pain of failure – quite the opposite – so why is such a punishing, painful and often agonizingly random experience continually perpetrated against gamers, who, for their part, usually only want to have fun? Sadly, the designers themselves aren’t even sure.

“My suspicion is that they’re the default ‘change of pace’ mission that basic shooter AI can handle,” says Dansky. “But that’s exactly the problem – the basic AI on your escortee does things like run into crates or move in front of you while you’re firing or go in for unnecessary cosmetic surgery.” All of which will end the escortee’s life – and your fun – all too quickly.

Even when the experience ends well, it’s rarely joyous. A player’s fondest memories are never about “that time I had to follow a dude through the Canyon of Death and shoo the vampire flies away from him before he died,” and reviews frequently fail to mention advances in escort mission technology, largely because there haven’t been any in a long time. In fact, escort missions tend to break technology, or at least point out its most glaring flaws.

“Escort missions make the NPC AI look like shit. Period,” says Jeff McGann, Creative Director at Red Storm Entertainment.

Take Sonntag’s example from Fable. The core of the quest, braving a cave full of monsters to rescue a wayward child, is noble, stirring even – in theory. What saps the fun out of the experience is the execution (pardon the pun) of the child’s AI.

“The child … only made my job harder to save him,” says Sonntag. “If a character simply wants to die – by either running into the hammer zone or the horrible goblin rape zone – I won’t be very motivated to save him or her. This child was simply a liability.”

“Nothing is more frustrating than attempting to lead an escort entity through the world and having it get stuck, running in place, against a trivial obstacle,” says McGann. “Some games also fudge the movement speeds of the escort entities so that they will move at a different rate than the player. This can create a rubber band effect and lead to player frustration where they are either fighting to keep up with the escort entity while moving too fast for comfort or they are constantly waiting for the escort entity and moving too slow for comfort.”

Which again raises the question: Why? Tying your progress to a character you can’t control, who’s often intentionally moving more slowly or more quickly than you are, or doing things that will ultimately lead to his doom – and your frustration – sounds like intentional torture. Games are supposed to be entertainment. What possible good could come from intentionally frustrating the player?

“Generally, escort missions are used to change up gameplay,” says John Feil, the level designer at LucasArts responsible for the escort missions in Star Wars: Episode One – Battle for Naboo. “There really aren’t a lot of types of missions out there. If you don’t want your game to be 100 percent full of ‘find the foozle and kill it/deliver something/save it from certain doom’ [missions], then you start considering escort missions.”

Or, as Dansky says: “You decide you need an escort mission when you look down at the checklist of all mission objectives and see ‘eliminate all enemies,’ ‘eliminate all enemies,’ ‘eliminate all enemies’ and ‘eliminate all enemies.'”

“The first problem an escort mission solves, is ‘Where do I go?'” says Feil. “In most escort missions, the thing you are escorting knows the way out. Using a mission like this, you can be sure that the player is unlikely to get lost.”

Feil says escort missions also prevent players from wandering too far and exploring undeveloped areas, eliminate the need for players to seek out enemies to kill and allow the designers to make it possible to tell a story to a player who’s no longer running all over the map exploring and searching for opponents. Escort missions create a single focus point from which the player dares not stray, to which enemies will flock and through whom the story can be channeled “without having to be a ‘floating head’ contacting him through remote means,” Feil says. “I still don’t like them, though.”

“I still think the best balm for repetitive/limited quest options is a brilliant story,” says Leanne Taylor, scriptwriter for Pandemic. “If you’re gathering something, it’s usually for a puzzle or for someone who’ll then turn around and use what you collected to kill a bunch of other things while you’re escorting him. It’s sad, but no one seems to be able to come up with anything better.”

And yet, they keep trying. But not purely out of a need to solve problems. Some designers genuinely want you to care about the characters they create, and putting you in a situation where their lives are in your hands is often seen as a shortcut to emotional investment.

Putting your life on the line to save someone else “is really cool in war movies,” says McGann, “but never translates well into videogames. Escorts attempt, and fail, to touch at the heart of sacrifice, protection and even love, in putting someone else’s wellbeing in front of your own, but with saves and loads what really is the emotional investment there, beyond frustration when they die and you fail over and over again?”

Escort missions are an attempt to solve a problem with tools wholly incapable of doing the job. Neither the technology nor the craft are to a point where it’s even remotely possible to create an escort mission that doesn’t flat out piss you off. It’s like trying to build a house with only a pair of pliers and some duct tape. You can do it, but it won’t be pretty, and you wouldn’t want to live in the resulting structure.

It’s enough to make you wonder if the problems escort missions are designed to solve could be avoided by simply making better games. Or better escort missions. Tracy Seamster, a designer at SOE, gave it a shot.

“I designed an escort mission for EverQuest II, mainly to do something slightly different with quests and get away from primarily killing things as an objective,” says Seamster. “Essentially, you locate a dog and ask it to show you where it’s been hiding. It will trot off and you follow him down the road. If you’re attacked by any aggro mobs, he’ll stop and wait for you to finish before continuing. If you wander too far away from him, he’ll bark at you to remind you that you’re with him.”

While not a typical escort mission – the dog doesn’t take damage, and you don’t so much escort him as follow him – Seamster’s mission nevertheless solves all of the major problems and seems to have been well received. You can even try it yourself – it’s still running. “It’s gone for over two years without anyone losing an eye,” Seamster says, “or the dog!”

“My goal was to create something that didn’t involve killing,” Seamster says. “I hoped it would make players feel as though they were helping in an investigation about what’s affecting the area and doing things they could to help the world. You meet one deputy who’s too afraid to even leave his post, as there is something out there. … His dog’s missing, he wants to know what happened, but he can’t bring himself to investigate. Cue the brave adventurer!”

This brings us back to Peter Molyneux and Fable. Or more precisely, the eagerly anticipated sequel due sometime next year. Molyneux’s presentation at GDC 2007 featured a dog very similar to Seamster’s that would lead you to objectives, alert you to the presence of enemies and serve as an emotional trigger in various circumstances. You could abandon it, for example, and force it to limp all the way home, still devoted to you, in spite of your cruelty. Molyneux suggested his dog is an attempt to do away with the intrusive mini-maps and escort missions of what he hopes to be game design’s past.

Will it work? Only time will tell. And if the secret to reforming the escort mission is transforming it into a follow quest, we may end up in a brave, new world. Perhaps a better one.

“Like anything else, [escort missions] have to be done well,” says McGann. “Players like being powerful and earning things and if the actions of an escort mission can provide this, then they will become more palatable … if not downright enjoyable. “

We should be so lucky.

Russ Pitts is an Associate Editor for The Escapist. His blog can be found at www.falsegravity.com.