Escort Missions - Dragging Dead Weight - Extra Credits 

I always liked the argument that Elizabeth is the one doing the annoying escort mission in Bioshock Infinite

One HUGE oversight in this whole video: expectations. Hear me out: the whole reason why we get frustrated by these escort missions is the disconnect between observed NPC behavior and our perception of them. - In Skyrim-like games, we all hate awful human characters running ahead and getting killed. Because we see them in armor-and-shield, therefor we expect them to be able to manage their own. We also expect them to keep up, them being humans with the same leg length. - The same with horses: them being unarmed horses, we expect them to follow us and flee to safety in the case of danger... but not 50 miles away. Yet they either get killed or flee into the pacific. - However, in Skyrim, there's also the great escort mission with the Daedric dog following us. It being a dog, we expect him to be more stupid. And it being a dog, its normal for it to be at a different pace. And it being daedric, it's normal for it to get into a fight (which a normal dog would also do anyway). Escort missions are often the place where NPC stretch and break away our expectations in ways that reminds us we're not in an experience, but a somewhat sh*tty programmed/designed game.

some escort missions make me wonder if the devs forgot that normal people tend to move away from things that can or want to hurt them because i swear to god some of these ai will just stand still while the enemy’s hit them with a standard attack that any rational human would at least *try* to avoid

Yoshi's Island is one single escort mission where the actual player character (Yoshi) is invulnerable

"This NPC is practically helpless, barely takes direction, everyone wants to kill it, and you'll have essentially no help stopping it from blundering into danger." "This Is The Way."

“If you make an escort quest, you have to make sure that they don’t walk slower than your run and faster than you walk.” Anyone that has had an escort.

What about the opposite? I remember a certain mission in Jedi Academy where you're paired up with Kyle Katarn (protagonist of prior Star Wars games and the Chuck Norris of the Expanded Universe). Far from being a liability, Kyle essentially escorts YOU whenever he's around, to the point where he usually mops the floor with any and all enemies you come across.

"You could just warp the NPC a few meters behind them so it seems like they've kept up every time they turn around" Creepy Watson wants to know your location

Three words: Weighted, Companion, and Cube.

The worse escort mission is bringing a cow to a pen in Minecraft

In XCOM, the escort missions allow you to control the character you are escorting like one of your own soldiers. They can still be a bit stressful sometimes, but that's just XCOM.

My personal "favorite" escort mission moment was in Command and Conquer: Renegade. I had to escort Dr. Mobius out of a Nod base. He was wearing a fancy suit of powered armor that made enemy attacks much less effective against him, which was nice. However, it's my understanding that the armor provided no bonus protection against friendly fire. In addition, headshots tend to be instant kills. Three guesses which part of the doctor's body suddenly got in front of my sniper rifle right when I was about to fire. In all seriousness, I don't hate escort missions. I seem to hold the same position as the Extra Credits team; they can be done well, but they're very easy to do badly.

I love that in Red Dead Redemption 2, when you walk/ride near someone, you automatically match their speed.

"...make enemies capture them instead." **ASHLEY PTSD INTENSIFIES**

5th rule of escort missions: If, for any reason, your escort character runs forwards to engage with an enemy, have them REMAIN AT THAT FORWARD POINT and continue walking to their destination from there. nothing is worse then watching your charge run forwards to engage an enemy, and then run back to their starting position to resume slowly walking. unrelated: But you can learn a lot about good escort missions from Half life episodes 1 and 2. Alyx has her own separate pathing and methods of survival, so she never feels like a burden.

When talking about emotional investment into the character we're escorting, i was really hoping to see companion cube in the artwork xD

There was one escort mission I adored: in WoW you had to collect a lot of orc workers and bring them back to town. They'd follow you like puppies on a leash and if you attacked something they'd gang on the target too, they weren't level 1 either but still low level for the area so a bunch of them could deal a lot of damage. A rogue player challenged me to a pvp fight just before I finished the mission, I said sure and the moment he attacked me he was mobbed by like 15 orcs and beaten to death. Ahh I wish I had recorded that, still makes me laugh even now.

"Who saves the weak from the man who saves the weak?" - Monsoon, Metal Gear Rising Revengeance (Said in the context that the mercenaries you slaughtered hardly had other career options to feed their families.)

Queen Minnie from KH2 was an excellent escort mission. She had a life bar, and actually defended herself and killed minor heartless. She was also a screen nuke and earned you experience for each enemy she killed.

I didn’t even realize that the last of us is just one huge escort mission.

I don't mind escort missions, as long as they move in my speed and don't actively try to kill me or themselves...

The illustrations throughout this video were top-notch!

Regarding speed, I'm a fan of the Fallout 4 model. If you run, the person you are escorting also runs to keep up.

Best escort mission is in FTL, Step 1: get money for accepting the mission Step 2: don't lead them to where they need to go because the rebel fleet is catching up with you and there isn't anything to lose

The fact that Ellie doesn't alert the zombies in The Last of Us ends up serving as a subtle piece of foreshadowing...

FINALY another proper Extra credits gameplay episode. It's been too long, too few of these. The other extra's have their plusses, but i joined the channel for this. Would like to see more plz.

Shout out to the Monster Hunter: World mission "The Best Kind of Quest" It knows us so well..

Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks, clever disguises escort missions, by making it so you need Zelda's help, and she needs yours. The Lego games do this as well.

4:57 spooky scary warping watson -Sherlock holmes: Nemesis

Interesting fact for those that don't know, The Last of Us was actually heavily influenced by Ico!

Be sure to have the escortee yell "Come on, hurry up!" whenever we stop to scavenge. >_< And ofc stand in front of you with a blank look during combat.

"The bomb is nearing a checkpoint!" - The calling card of an 'escort mission' lots of people seem to like. Though in this case the bomb doesn't need to be protected, just pushed forwards. The other kind of easily tolerable escort is the old Space Combat Simulators missions when you guard a cargo ship moving on rails against waves of enemies. Though in that case the target can usually take a lot of hits, and you tend to have fellow escorts to help.

*reads Title* Oh, don't even get me STARTED on those... 😒

Something I like about escort missions in Fallout 4, is that, once you're in combat, you can hop out of your power armor, and whoever you're escorting might hop into said power armor, greatly improving their durability and usefulness, but that's if they can use power armor. One of the earliest NPCs you can try this with is Travis. But, then again, letting Travis use power armor is often part of a larger exploit with 3 specific escort missions in the game.

Man, I remember this one time I was playing RE4, and one of the dudes shot a crossbow bolt at me; so I dodged it. Ashley did not dodge it. She had the health to tank the shot, but I felt so bad. I will say, for the escort quests where your escortee is running on a track to a specified destination, it's not so bad, since they won't get themselves into trouble (at least not any more than the designer intended), you always know where they are, where they're going, and where they *should be* if you happen to lose track of them. Also, I think the intention with making the NPCs move slightly faster than your running speed, but much slower than your sprinting speed is to make it so you can kind of orbit around them. Like, this makes it so you might hit the failure condition of losing track of them, while also allowing you to blast ahead to head off problems. I only ever really noticed this in TES games, though, because there are a LOT of instances where you and your NPC are just kinda... walking together. Warframe does the thing where your escort target will just teleport to keep up with you; on top of that, they don't even need to make it to the end goal of the mission, they just need to still be alive when you get there. DE knew they couldn't possibly create an AI that could follow a Tenno properly, so this was probably the best solution.

One of my favorite games in terms of Escort Missions is The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. There's not too many escort sequences, the NPCs can keep up (or are even slightly ahead of you, but tied to your movements) and the sequences aren't too long. It's just enough to show how you're a super-powered badass, but not enough to make you resent everyone and everything.

Everytime I turn around and nobody's in sight: LYDIA!

5:05 or just make it so that the NPC walks when the player walks, and runs when the player runs. Making them move at a pace the player decides.

NPC: "Look, a special enemy" Me: "Shoot it!" NPC: "Nah, Imma whack it with my sword." Every AI in Vermintide

I think the two biggest issues I have with escort missions are "stop blocking the door" and that "slower than your run, but faster than your walk, so you're always having to constantly toggle run/walk button." Glad to see someone else finally say it out loud. =P

When done well, it’s nice to have a companion.

when he described the speed of NPC being just slow enough that you cant run and just fast enough to catch up to you when you walk. I just blew up laughing, because that is the biggest gripe I ever had with games. Also goes for "follow the NPC to nowhere" type of stuff. you walk and they gain distance, you run and that is just too fast. Oh, games, sometimes you make it easy for us to hate you! Even though we love you! :D

My favourite escort mission was having Bow-Wow in links awakening

Back in Team Fortress Classic, there was a mode called "The Hunted", where one player was only given an umbrella. One team helped this player get from point A to point B, and the other attempted to specifically take The Civilian out. This was later turned into the Payload in TF2. But having the Escort Mission being to protect a fellow PC makes them very fun :)

3:50 Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga gets points for effort here.

A Chrono Trigger outtro theme! Great pick EC!

The escort missions in the first two Pokémon Mystery Dungeon games were *super* fun, weren't they? Carrying a lv 1 weakling that dies in one hit, potentially to far away enemies, for as long as 99 floors, if needed.

Thanks for another great video guys!

We liked Elizabeth because she was likeable, bordering on being incapable of being a problem, and can't die as far as I remember. Same with Ellie iirc, but it's been donkey's years so I may be misrememberimg.

My favorite escort mission is still Sig in Jak 2 he was competent enough to deal with some enemies but there were enough of them in the level to still need your help. He also kept fighting stuff even when pausing to charge shots or fix his gun and talked enough you got a feel for his character.

Yahtzee: "at least Ashley from RE4 new her place in the game.. it was on a BIN!"

I remember a space ship simulator game that had escort missions in it, and I loved how they did them. You would, periodically, be asked to escort some sort of other, less-armed (or unarmed) ship from one station to another, through hostile space. You knew what their course would be ahead of time and roughly how long it'd take them at their cruising speed, which you could also learn. Their speed, too, would be based on how their ship was equipped, and not some arbitrary slower-than-the-player's-ship thing. Sometimes, pirates would attack, and the escortee's AI would have them react as you'd expect an unarmed freighter to react: stick to the course and keep speed unless there was some hazard (mines, avoidable ordnance, etc) they could avoid. After all, they paid you -the PC- to cover their butts from the pirates. And the part that actually made it really cool: you could tell the NPC ship to red-line their engines to the next waypoint (usually an FTL jump), at the risk of damaging the engines and making them slower from there on. The sad thing is, I can't recall for the life of me what the game was called. I found it via an old, now-defunct, abandonware site.

Short answer: No Long Answer: NNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOO

I'm really thankful for channel. Thanks to the plethora of information offered in your videos, it's recently garnered me a job in the gaming industry! You guys KNOW your stuff!

0:00 Nope.

Can I say Thank You!!! for including Team Ico games in the video ❤️

4:50 I'm looking at you Skyrim -.-

Wow. An extra credits video that makes good points. I havent seen this since the last announcer was here.

"T H A T B A S T A R D C A L L E D M E D E A D W E I G H T ! ! ! ! !"

I really like these videos. It’s a good way to pass the time when I don’t want to study

Wasn’t there one in Skyward Sword where you had to escort a character who was supposed to be annoying?

Finally a good video about game design again. Please more of this

Just make escort missions with waifus. Easy money.

1:12 2:18 6:00 - Ico was one of my favorite PS2 games. It could be frustrating when dealing with the shadow creatures sometimes, and you only have a stick to whack them with, but the puzzles and they journey were SO satisfying that it made it all worth it. I'd love to see a port of this to PS4. They already did Shadow of the Colossus, so why won't Team Ico port the game that made them Team Ico to begin with?

_"Slow yourself adventurer! _*_*Ahu! Ahu! Ahu!*_*_ "_

One missed solution for NPC escort walk speed: Rubber banding. Adjust their speed based on distance to player. as you run away they speed up to a run to keep up. They get to some max distance and then their speed outpaces the player. This can have a cap to not be too unrealistic as long as that cap is faster then the fastest legal movement speed of the player. (you could also share speed buffs so they can keep up if player has run speed increased or something)

screams in assassin's creed

One of the best things assassin's creed odyssey did right is the escort missions. The NPC would follow you at a pace that is so slightly slower than yours so they can't get left behind, and if you're escorting a soldier rather than a civilian, they will be able to climb on a little less than what Alexios / Kassandra can climb on.

Having played The Last of Us, I can say the frame at 3:18 is 100% accurate.

I finally understand why I hated the toad escort missions in Luigi's Mansion, dark Moon. It's a character that you basically never see you again, you've never seen before, you weren't attached to, they made way too much noise, they were slower than you when you were running but if you try and vacuum them and hold them, then you are slower anyway.

I'd rather go to the dentist than do an escort mission.

5:40 Armored Ashely was quite a hilarious unlock in RE4. Made expert mode more tolerable too when she was perfectly immune and ganados picking her up would have their knees buckle from the weight. ;3

I'm going to agree with everyone else here. Bioshock Infinite is the best escort mission. The big thing is that Elizabeth can't be hurt mid combat. You on li y have to worry about yourself, and the escort is left for the narrative.

Can I think of the companion cube from Portal as an escortee? As per 2:13, it never acts on its own. 2:48 is accomplished with the pink heart design, and with the cube providing essential help like deflecting projectiles. Sure, it's invulnerable, which is atypical for an escort mission, but the mission requires you to haul both yourself and the cube to the end, which is slightly more hassle than hauling just yourself since carrying the cube obscures your vision. Also, it manages to fulfill the condition at 5:48 despite it being introduced (kindof) in that level.

*when your escort is being attacked* MAMA BEAR'S COMING!!!

I actually like it when the AI allies are actually better then me sometimes. I remember playing the original rainbow six and they would often save my ass by shooting enemies I missed or couldn't see. It was a nice feeling to have someone watch your back in such an unforgiving game.

i think the last guardian is one of the more "interesting" escort games

I haven't actually seen any escort missions in a while, and those that I remember were: A) Short B) No path finding, just rails at the very slow pace C) the escort is either invulnerable, and it either stops before you clear the path or just moves so slow so it's a challenge for you to survive long enough; or it has huge amounts of health, like escorting a tank in Brothers in Arms. I can remember in HL2 the elevator waiting sequence, which wasn't actually escort, but the goal was similar. And taken a more obscure game, Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon, there tons of things similar to escort missions, first there is like a big battle level where we need to keep up with multiple defense systems, repairing a cannon, killing the enemies that break the cannon, recharge ammo of the cannon when asked, destroying what can be called Tanks that inevitably come and need you to spend some time on them, all at the same time. And at some point the cannon shooter is out of the cannon and we need to escort him back, the problem being a) the cannon is still taking damage, b) the guy will not try to go to the cannon if there are enemies nearby because he's too scared. He is invulnerable though, and the path is not very long, so it's enjoyable. And in other instances there are situations where you need to bring a "companion cube" all the way through a part of a level, and with a "companion cube" your movement options are severely nerfed and you basically have one of the two playable dragons being an escort. But it's still enjoyable because it's just your companion dragon again with the same ai as before and you can take direct control of them, and it becomes more of a puzzle than an escort

why can't they just switch the formula and make a F O L L O W mission with G O O D A I

I like how Zoey became the player escorting the narrator around. There's also the other side of the escort coin of the hostage. That's when you have to take someone to a point who doesn't want to go. Those mechanics should be different but not so much that it's a pain.

I know I am the odd man out, but i like escort missions à la being a bodyguard/mercenary and protect a client

Oh god, when you brought up that escort mission in Twilight Princess I thought back to Arin from Game Grumps absolutely _failing_ that mission and not understanding it at all ("the cart can be on fire a little bit"). So sometimes player competence can come into it. XD Speaking of Arin, he also totally misunderstood how to get Dampe to follow you in Majora's Mask. All he had to do was target him, but he didn't and tried to get him to follow him anyway.

Me: AHHHHHHH JUST LISTEN TO ME! NPC: Do u kno da wae?

thank you, this was what I was waiting for :3

The only escort mission I like is Overwatch's escort mode

"Nosferatu: Wrath of Malachi" did escorts pretty well. They have tons of health, give blatant audio clues when attacked or pathfinding fails, don't cost you the game if they die, are baked into the story as individually valuable while being safe to ignore from a gameplay perspective, fit perfectly into the games ticking clock risk/reward theme, and generally serve as optional, minor sub-victories/defeats during the process of the overall quest.

"slodiers and police are meant to protect us" laughs in 2020

Abe's Odissey was a big escort mission for NPCs you just met. It was great. They did everything that is suggested in this video: you had a command to make they follow you or stop, and they had ZERO behaviors outside of that. They were very dumb following you, though, and would jump themselves to certain death or accidentally touch hazards, which was hilarious and fit with the game's dark humor.

One thing I absolutely love about the Witcher 3 is that NPC keeps the same speed as you. When you walk, they walk. When you sprint, they sprint. And when you stop, they stop. Not to mention the great dialogs along the way. Another example I can remember is AC Revelation, where if you're close to the NPC you auto-follow. Much less engaging though.

An escort mission I liked was a side mission in Yakuza 0. Where you escort ahem "Miracle Johnson" who is not Michael Jackson the creators swear. Anyway essentially this Miracle Johnson wants to have a music video where the zombie extras are actually attacking, so Kiryu (the protagonist) assists by fighting them as "Miracle" dances in a fairly straight line through the road. There wasn't anything special mechanically going on, but I found the situation itself to be so endearing that I didn't mind the escort mission at all.

The best escort mission I've seen is in Metro 2033 when you find a kid next to his dead uncle. Instead of having him follow you, the protagonist throws him on his back and the entire mission is played with a slight imbalance in the movement controls. Best mission ever.

My dad had an old PC game from the early 2000s called Apache Air Assault (it's pretty much the only video game he played) and his favorite mission in the game was called "Red Cross Escort," so he liked them. I'm pretty neutral toward them; I didn't even realize they were almost universally disliked.

One last pitfall that almost every game bungles up: Please, give the player a "manual override"-esque ability to pick up the escortee and move them to a specific spot where you can drop them. Because inevitably, the pathfinding *will* fuck up eventually, for someone. You can make carrying really nerfed, such as slow, can't attack, lower hp, or such. But at least have it so players can move npc's around that one corner, over that one curb, up those stairs, and out of that geometry it clipped into. In fact, it might be useful to let the player do this to _any_ npc, lest we are locked inside shops because a npc decides to stand in front of the door forever. Warping to player based on distance can mitigate some of those issues, but not all. Also, wasn't mentioned in the video, but it is often nice if the game makes you unable to hurt the npc. Such as turning off ff, or even one of those where the gun is made non-functional when pointing at them.

Ace Combat. Most of the Escort missions tend to be part of a Score Attack type thing, with you running back and forth between battlefields to assist in the troops deployed on the ground(5, 6, and I think 0 did these). It's still escort, because if you fail to assist them in time during certain events you will lose, but it's also part of the most fun mission type in the game to make up for it. 4's defense of the two airliners wasn't bad either, but it's such a short mission that it barely counts, and of course, the logic of one plane not being able to ascend, but the other one could totally descend if it wanted to, so you wouldn't have to go between the two altitudes so much(Though admittedly, I still enjoy it) 7's Stonehenge Defensive mission, a flip from the Stonehenge Offensive of 4 was quite fun too, though it didn't feel as fun because of the spawn ins being a bit too constant for parts of the mission, though I'm aware that's a taste thing.

This is one of the things I found worked really well in the first fable game, there was one mandatory quest for an escort mission but you get side quests now and then for xp and cash. In these missions they move at decent speed, not fast enough to keep sprint but not constantly stopping either, you could give a stay/follow command to keep them clear of a fight, and while there weren't necessarily tanks they could fight back with fists (not super good but allowed them to stop an enemy with very low hp) and they could be healed by the healing spell you can get really early on meaning give your mana a few seconds to recover and you can patch up any damage received.

It interests me that this video is talking specifically about escort missions in RPGs and the like. One of the thoughts I initially had was fighter escort missions in flight or space simulator games. Those do work (in most cases), but largely because they do naturally follow a lot of the rules here. The bombers, transport ships, or whatever you're escorting usually stick to a fairly predictable flightplan (with the possible exception of some "fighter-bomber" types like Star Wars Y-wings, and even then you've still got a good idea of what they're going to be trying to do), and regardless of whether or not they have turrets or some other ability to fight back, they're usually still durable enough (certainly more so than the player's fighter) that they're not likely to go down in a few seconds of inattention. A good radar system can also make it easier to keep track of where they are and whether there are enemies mobbing the escortee.

Speaking of basically everything said in this vid: HL2. Alyx Vance's walking speed was specifically set to be slightly faster than the player's walking speed, and was mentioned in the dev commentary citing these very reasons. She also gets special take down animations that are designed to make her seem like she's in a tough fight rather than just killing enemies, has empathic scenes throughout and is generally helpful without meaningfully aggro-ing enemies. I don't recall her pathing failing either, though it has been a long time. Alternatively: the companion cube.

The thumbnail gave me a good chuckle

Hmm... this takes me to a game called Warframe. Something close they have to escort missions are “Rescue missions” where you have to free a prisoner from an enemy prison, and get ro extraction. The person getting escorted actually runs at a fairly good speed, but if you want to go even faster and become far away from the escortee, the escortee will teleport to a distance about 5m away from you. You can also have the option to give them your 2nd weapon and take it back from them. The escortee does not have much HP, but the game is built so that the enemies will probably prioritize you to shoot instead of the escortee. Also if he gets shot and gets his HP to 0, the escortee will not die, but you’ll get a timer long enough for you to revive him/her, and carry on to extraction. Warframe actually has decent escort missions that are not absolute pain in the ass now that I think of it.

Escort missions can work really well in space sims where you need good solid tactics to intercept the bombers before they get in range to your transports. X-Wing and Tie-Fighter had some great missions around this.