You can almost love it. Almost. Why are escort missions still a thing?

The history of escort missions also includes instances of more conscious designs. Some devs seemingly understood that these missions aren't exactly the players' favorite. They tried to improve it somehow in order to provide players with a spectrum of emotions wider than from hatred to contempt.

Naughty Dog, in The Last of Us, as well as in the games from the Uncharted series, gave us, for example, allies that we didn't have to care about at all – in sneaking sequences, they were completely invisible to enemies (even if they ran from cover to cover right under their noses), and they ware able to get shot so many times that many players actually thought they were immortal. Well, they were not – it's just that someone made the effort and thought about what the players don't like and came up with the brilliant idea of not giving it to them. The realism suffered, but it was a sacrifice that we took quite willingly – in return, we were spared the nuisance.

During the sneaking sequences in The Last of Us, Ellie was virtually invisible to opponents. Fortunately.

The cult Ico is basically a single, super long escort mission, in which the responsibility for a harmless being not only isn't annoying, but constitutes one of the game's major forces. How was this achieved? By giving players more control – we could summon her and grab her hand to get her into safety. This simple solution completely changed the dynamics of the struggle, allowing us to decide.

Ico and games from Naughty Dog are examples of two methods that make escort missions less cumbersome. Why don't developers always give us the ability to control the situation? A simple system of commands, a simple "wait/follow" is enough to avoid getting caught in the middle. Uncharted and TLoU, on the other hand, show a second way, that is, to make our comrades sufficiently resilient (or simply immortal).

However, both methods pose a problem (at least for developers, because for me, a person who profoundly hates escorts, it's not a problem at all) as they trivialize these tasks, making them no different from all the other missions. Which, in view of developers, renders them pointless. And that's why we still have traditional escort missions in games, and they stubbornly don't want to die out.

Ico is proof that you can make an entire game based on escorting in a way that won't bother players. Just think about it for longer than two minutes.

Perish!

Ace Combat 7 gave me a few more escort missions, although I was coping a little better with them than with this damned task number six. Overall, I was thrilled with the game, but if I could change one single thing, it would be these damn escort missions. There are so many other methods to diversify gameplay. Limiting time. Races and mini-games. Stealth. Even underwater sections – another favorite diversion, which is now somewhat less common – the seemingly are better solutions.

Escort missions really don't make any sense. No one likes them. Nobody wants them. They all need to disappear. Or at least be conceived with more effort. They still wouldn't make anymore sense, but at least they wouldn't drive you mad.