Escort Mission

"Sorry, psycho. This one's about protecting, not killing."

— Comic Book Guy, The Simpsons Game

Escort Missions are sections or levels in a video game where you have to saveguard a relocating NPC, keeping them alive through one or more challenges without getting killed or seriously hurt, or sometimes even touched. This wouldn't be so bad, except that the NPC far too often suffers from unbelievable Artificial Stupidity: they die from minimal damage, run ahead into danger before you can clear it, step into your line of fire, and otherwise act Too Dumb to Live. A lazy dev team might have difficulty programming in checkpoints for these missions^note if you die and go back to a checkpoint (and the NPC dying may very well also be a “start over” failure condition), they need to code it so the NPC starts near you, so you might suffer some Checkpoint Starvation through all of this. As a result, Escort Missions have a tendency to become That One Level.

Missions not formally meant to be Escort Missions sometimes become them when you're saddled with aggressive NPCs whose survival is one of your victory conditions. Most of the time, these NPCs are considered to be cast in a support role or otherwise allied to your cause from a plot point of view.

It takes a bit of effort to do one of these levels well, but when they are, it can be amazing. One way to make them less annoying is to give the NPC some combat ability of their own. Alternately, you can give the NPCs Gameplay Ally Immortality, but that tends to lead to You Call That a Wound?, and in some of the best Escort Missions, instead of giving the character you have to protect a bad AI, they are given no AI at all and they just follow a predetermined path, or even just walk straight.

Escort Missions are typically found in First Person Shooters, Third Person Shooters, and flight simulator style games, as well as some styles of RPG. They also exist outside of games, where they're used as plot devices, yielding a Live-Action Escort Mission, where The Load takes the place of the NPC. If the NPC you're supposed to protect has a bad habit of running into your line of fire or trying to take on foes stronger than he/she is, then you have to deal with a Leeroy Jenkins.

Notably, this trope is slowly becoming discredited and vanishing from modern games, after dev teams realized many people dislike these sorts of missions. A lot of the ones still showing up now tend to try and take precautions to reduce player frustrations. A middle path, found in some stealth based games with mechanics for carrying and hiding dead and unconscious guards, is to render the escorted NPC unconscious from the start and have the player carry it out of danger, using the aforementioned mechanics. Besides lifting the necessity to program an ally AI, this is much more convenient for players who don't have to worry about the NPC getting out of wherever they had hid them and into the line of fire. Another way games have reconstructed this trope is by having character being escorted follow right behind the player without being an an explicit hinderance. This means all the player has to do is get the Player Character to the destination safely like they always would.

If your charge is stationary, it is a Protection Mission, which may be easier. If your charge must remain unaware of your presence or of any danger, it's a Stealth Escort Mission. If most of the game (if not the entire thing) is an escort mission, see Escort Game. See also Hero Must Survive, We Cannot Go On Without You. For when you are being protected, see Reverse Escort Mission. If your charge is a group of animals that requires some gentle nudging in the correct direction, it's probably a Herding Mission. Sister Trope to Product Delivery Ordeal. Often overlaps with No-Harm Requirement if it's made explicitly clear or required that the one being escorted cannot take much, if ANY harm at all for the mission to be a success. Games might even give the player different scores depending on how well they did this.

Escort missions are also depicted in films, TV shows and stories. The escorted persons may be a Damsel in Distress, cute little orphans, or witnesses on their way to testify against the Big Bad in court (and the bad guys would love to have those witnesses "silenced permanently"). The escort can be a single Action Hero or Gunslinger or a team of soldiers, police, or bodyguards. If the environment is extremely dangerous, even people who normally don't need an escort may get one. For example, police officers going into The City Narrows to arrest the Big Bad in his lair may need a SWAT unit bristling with More Dakka to escort them in.

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Video Game Examples:

Action

• cloudphobia has you escorting an off-screen mothership. If enemies escape off-screen, they will attack the mothership and deplete its Life Meter. Allowing the mothership's life meter to empty out is one of three ways to get a Game Over (the other two being to run out of your own life or the timer to run out).
• Star Wars Battlefront (2015)'s Battle Station mode forces the Rebels to guide R2-D2 through a section of the Death Star into a transport off the station. R2-D2 is actually playable and can be taken control of by any rebel who activates him first, but if the Empire does enough damage to the droid, he'll deactivate and the player will respawn as a soldier again. This doubles as a Timed Mission, since the Empire can't permanently kill R2 and will only win if the Rebels take too long.
• Reti in Star Wars Starfighter. At one point, you have to escort him through a twisty canyon. The problem is that even if the entire Trade Federation army is in a part of the canyon, he isn't going to stop and hide for even ten seconds while you eliminate the AMT missile tanks. Did we mention that said canyon apparently has a glass roof stuck over the top, since you can't leave it for even a second?

Action Adventure

• The Lego Adaptation Games have parts where one character can't climb a cliff or the terrain is dangerous for a character and the others have to clear out paths and puzzles to bring another character to that spot.
• In Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, the player has to escort Leanna at a couple of points in the game, firstly in nearly all of these points she can be told to wait while you clear the enemies out first, she can instantly heal herself and you during combat, she can do decent damage to enemies and she tries to keep a distance between herself and said enemies, sometimes even positioning behind the player to heal you while you block them.
• The Dead to Rights games have a variety of escort quests, though most aren't too difficult. Retribution, along with a "Being Escorted" example, has two particularly unique escort missions. The first involves carrying along a wounded civilian, who slowly bleeds out and only regenerates health when Jack is actively shielding her body with his own. The second has an escort who is not only has a ridiculous amount of health but is carrying an unlimited supply of ammo. And since said escort is a criminal, Jack has no qualms about using him as a Human Shield.
• In Disney Princess: Enchanted Journey, the player has to help Jaq and Gus in Cinderella's world, and Abu in Jasmine's world. Luckily, nothing bad can happen to them if the Bogs reach them.
• Ecco the Dolphin:
  • The Caverns of Hope level in Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future had an Escort Mission, which thankfully wasn't all that tough, but still fairly annoying. That green Outcast dolphin is fairly good at keeping your pace, but for being a part of the Resistance, which is supposed to be the only thing standing in the way of those ugly Clan dolphins, he's kind of a wimp. His job is to guide you to the end of the level, and your job is to make sure he and those annoying Clan guards don't come within ten feet of each other. If one gets near him, he'll squeal and try to go back to where he came from, and you have to track him down and sonar him to get him back to the task at hand.
  • The original series has a few of these as well, with guiding dolphins and baby orca back to their podmates. For the most part these aren't too bad—the NPCs can't be harmed and can't drown either, however the baby orca hunt in hard mode of Tides of Time approaches Scrappy Level proportions due to the sheer number of lost calves.
• Enslaved: Odyssey to the West has you spend most of your time escorting someone, but she generally pulls her own weight, or hides while you're fighting.
• During one level of The Force Unleashed you are told to protect a Jedi from Imperials at all costs. Things look bad. He's old. He's blind. This is surely going to be a hard mission right? Wrong! He's a Jedi! What kind of Jedi can't take care of himself? To boot, he has a nice high HP pool. The only snag is that the game can bug out during that mission: halfway through the old man forgets how to walk. He'll still kick the ass of anything that gets close enough but force choke and force push are required to move him forward.
• During a chapter in Ghost Trick, you must help an imprisoned captive flee from a prison that endured a blackout. You don't actually have to kill people, you just need to keep your ally out of the sight range of patrolling guards. But since you're a ghost, you will need to lead him into waypoints by pointing to these points, effectively making him join them and eventually hide in them. Involves climbing as well, but the character can handle it rather well despite his size.
• God of War:
  • God of War:
    • In the second stage of the final boss, you must protect a stationary target from a horde of enemies.
    • In the non-European versions of the game^note the escortee was changed to a regular undead enemy, the escortee is a man trapped in a cage, and you are pushing him up a slope to burn him alive as a human sacrifice. He begs for his life the entire time you're pushing him. Even Kratos seems unhappy with what he's going to do.
  • God of War II has one very brief Escort Mission in the Temple of the Fates, where Kratos has to forcibly drag a translator about 100 feet to an inscription, protecting him en route and while he reads. Of course, after you take care of all the enemies, Kratos immediately kills the translator by bashing his head into the altar (it's required, though; the inscription ends with the reader offering himself as a sacrifice to prove the subject's worthiness).
  • God of War III features two escort portions. Get ready to hear Pandora calling for help for the last leg of the game, because she likes to walk into a room and stand on the giant X marked beneath the room's newest deathtrap. It's somewhat subverted in that during combat sequences, the escortee will do lots of dodge-rolls to make sure she gets out of the way.
• Gotham Knights (2022) has a few missions in the 'heroic assault' game mode that require players to escort a laser cannon to its destination. The cannon stops moving if you stray more than a few feet away and the propulsion mechanism frequently breaks down, forcing the player to stop and repair it. Throughout all of this the player will have to be constantly dodging attacks and stopping enemies from trying to smash the thing.
• Honkai Impact 3rd features two different ones:
  • One side mission in Theresa's side story (Everlasting Memory) requires you to protect Theresa from several waves of zombies and Honkai beasts as she slowly walks across the courtyard of St. Freya's toward the main building.
  • One possible Sakura Samsara mission is to find a "Red Fox Soul" wandering around the Sparrow Hill area and escort it into the nearby town, requiring the player to avoid entering battle until the soul enters the town's boundary. If you do get into combat, the soul vanishes and you'll have to find it again and start the process over.
• inFAMOUS contains a variation. Some of the Good missions require you to escort captured prisoners to the nearest Police Station. Occasionally, they'll try to make a break for it, and you'll have to chase after them.
  • Let's not forget the evil counterparts where you lead Dust Man to a place so you can blast them into the ocean. For an escort mission, the reward is satisfying.
• In a game as hard as Jak II: Renegade, the number of difficult escort missions is surprisingly set squarely at 1. The hardest escort mission in the game involves escorting a kid though the city, made difficult by the automatic movement of the escort NPC and his completely understandable lack of intelligence. All other escorts are either carried by vehicle or armed with weaponry, allowing them to hold their own for a long enough period for you to do what you have to do, whether it be killing enemies or solving a door puzzle.
• Lagoon does this as your first real mission. It's rather sweet, considering how easy it is for you to die...
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past:
    • Link must escort Zelda out of the castle dungeon at the start of the game. Thankfully, all NPCs are immune to damage in this game.
    • In the Dark World, Link finds the missing swordsmith turned into a frog and trapped behind some heavy rocks (which he can lift with the treasure from the dungeon north of there) and has to take him back to his shop in the Light World. This is of course required to obtain the Infinity -1 Sword from the swordsmiths (which is upgraded to the Infinity +1 Sword later).
    • Another brief one is the old man on Death Mountain whom you lead home after he loses his lantern.
    • The disguised thief Blind has elements of an escort mission. One of the rare examples of the player escorting an enemy boss.
    • Two non-living examples: at one point, Link has the option to "escort" a locked treasure chest to a man who can open it, and later must "escort" a bomb to destroy a certain wall. Both of these are made slightly difficult because pressing "A" (e.g. to run or lift something) or running off a ledge will "disconnect" the item until Link walks back to retrieve it. And if one is not quick enough, the bomb will explode.
    • There is also the monkey that is needed to open the Palace of Darkness. He requires 10 rupees to just have him follow you and another 100 to open the palace. Compared to the other escorts, getting hurt does cause the monkey to run away. This means having to pay another 10 rupees just to get him back. Thankfully, there are about three enemies between finding the monkey and getting to the palace entrance, and it is possible to deny the monkey at first, then go ahead and kill the enemies before coming back.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening: Occurs when Link escorts Marin around the island until reaching Animal Village, although she's invulnerable to damage.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time: Princess Ruto in the third dungeon. Not only do you have to escort her, you have to carry her. She doesn't take damage and you can throw her at enemies.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask has one if you save a ranch on the night of the first day. On the second night, you help a milk cart get to town, and must fight off two men from a rival ranch who try to attack the cart with your arrows. You have infinite arrows while doing this, allowing you to basically shoot the crap out of them the entire time, and you only fail the mission if they hit you three times and break all three jugs of milk. Success gets you entry to a bar, and some Marshmallow Hell. This then becomes laughably easy if you wear a certain one of the game's many masks. The attackers won't even do anything except ride after you.
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: You are tasked with escorting two Sages through their respective temples. They are required to solve the temples and cannot be killed, but Floormasters can grab them and haul them back a few rooms. At least they don't take them all the way to the beginning of the dungeon, as expected by Floormasters in most Zelda games.
  • Late in The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures you have to escort Princess Zelda while trying to escape the crumbling Palace of Winds. Her mobility and intelligence leaves a lot to be desired, unmindful of whatever enemies are in her way, and she has only one heart of health. This is made worse by her having the ability to teleport which she used several times earlier in the game but now just chooses not to use, as well as a glitch that can render her completely immobile if she falls from a height, forcing you to restart the entire level as well as face Vaati all over again.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, you have to escort a comatose prince from a huge, fortified city to a small mountain town's shaman/doctor by fighting off raiders that try to light his wagon on fire (your tornado-spewing boomerang can take care of that). Fortunately, it's a resilient little wagon. Unfortunately, the enemies drop bombs that blow hard enough to spook the horse off the path.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass: The Ghost Ship. Link has to escort three sisters to the safe spot where the fourth sister is. They give bad advice, scream and alert all the enemies in the area if they get too close to a Skulltula, and in general act like they're trying to sabotage you... which they are, which only makes it better in that you get to kill them once they reveal their true colors.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds, you have to escort a young thief out of the Thieves' Hideout she was imprisoned in. She can't defend herself (Her weapons and armor were taken away from her), but she follows you at about the same pace you run, you need her help to activate switches, and because the monsters who are after her are very slow, there's nothing preventing you from taking her somewhere safe when they pop up, or temporarily leave her behind to do the stuff you can do on your own. And even if she does get captured and you have to start again, you don't have to do the puzzles or kill the enemies again, provided you stay in the dungeon.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks:
    • The Force Gem sidequests which don't involve transporting items from one place to another instead require you to transport people from one place to another without taking too much damage during the ride.
    • Big Keys in the Tower of Spirits are electrified and Link can't carry them, so Zelda (in Phantom armor) carries them instead — but then you have to protect her from Keymasters who try to take the key back.
    • Phantom Zelda in the first part of the fight with Cole and Malladus has to guide Link to the front of the train, while Malladus shoots a laser beam.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Link has to guide Scrapper to Eldin Volcano Summit due to the robot bringing him to the bottom of the volcano. Link has to defeat every monster he encounters and make sure Scrapper is not attacked along the way.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has you sneak past flying robots with searchlights with a Goron in order to fire him out of cannons at the Humongous Mecha controlling them. Problem is, if the robots notice you then Divine Beast Vah Rudania will cause the volcano to erupt and send volcanic boulders raining down on your head. Your escortee can use magic to protect himself (while you aren't so lucky), and will always run backward if either of you get caught forcing you to try to get him through again.
  • In Hyrule Warriors, some scenarios or map squares have Messengers on your side that need to make it to one of your allied keeps to call for reinforcements. These messengers are beyond the level of Artificial Stupidity that the game usually displays and can barely make it to even the next-closest allied keep without your character practically holding their hands. The game likes to give you at least 3 of them at once, all running off to different directions, and immediately run smack-dab into the middle of a group of enemies that includes a captain monster that even your better allies can have difficulty defeating. Frequently, the message "Messenger is in trouble" will pop up before changing to "Messenger is in danger" rather fast. If you do happen to manage to get rid of the captain monsters and leaving merely the Cannon Fodder minions behind, the messenger will still be incapable of deciding to ignore the Cannon Fodder and just proceed the few steps left to safely make it to the keep. Instead, they refuse to move a single step and rather focus in trying to defeat the minions one by one, so to make them move you have to make sure to get rid of the captain monster as well as a good chunk of the minions before the Messenger with finally move again.
• In Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, completing an escort mission in the prologue is a key part of the What If? narrative that differentiates it from Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Working with Jeritza to save Monica from Those Who Slither In the Dark turns the entire story on its head.
• The Matrix: Path of Neo:
  • This was mostly played straight and the AI was pretty good about it. However, one mission hung a lampshade: one particular escort character just walks along a scripted path, not caring about getting caught in the crossfire, because that character is immune to gunfire and the bullets bounce back at the enemies. Neo comments on this.
  • There are over 10 in The Matrix: Path of Neo, some don't get in your way and actually help a bit - Chang Tzu, Roland, Ballard, Niobe. While one just stands until he gets grabbed/carried off/thrown around/almost killed by the enemies. One guy is not quite invulnerable and so, of course, he tries to get shot - that gets lampshaded.
  Neo: [disbeliving] So, you're just gonna walk right through the middle of a fire fight ?
  Old Chinese herbalist: [calm] Why should I fear when I have you to protect me ?
• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption has two of these.
  • For the first, Samus has to escort a nuke to the Leviathan while the Pirates try to shoot it down — some of them land with the sole purpose of stalling her. Losing the "escort" is certifiably fatal for Samus; if the fall and storms don't kill her, the nuke will. Once the Pirates are chased off, Samus has five minutes to fix and activate the escape pod before she rides the bomb into the Leviathan. What makes this escorting an invulnerable, by the way, is that Samus is riding the nuke's transport. If the pirates shoot it down, you die. The nuke itself is immune to basically anything.
  • The second of these has Samus escorting a dozen GF Demolition Troops to a certain door so they can blow it up and let her through. Naturally, the Pirates will try to gun them down every step of the way, but the GF troops fire back, and are actually reasonably competent. There are twelve Troops, but you only need four to survive in order to proceed with the level. However, there's a Token for completing the mission with all twelve surviving.
• Nobody Saves the World: One side quest has Nobody protect a very slow mail-rabbit so he can safely deliver an order of dragon-nip, but it's completely optional.
• Pokémon Rumble World contains a lot of missions where you escort a Mii through the level. These Mii characters will blindly follow you and stand directly in front of enemies, cannons and all manner of other dangerous things unless you try to lead them away, which is often impractical and enemies tend to follow you anyway. These missions are easy to fail due to Mii stupidity even if you're a skilled player. They can thankfully be healed using Heal Pulse; the move in question is otherwise a Useless Useful Spell.
• The first Rogue Squadron game features the notorious "Escape from Fest", in which the player has to protect a trio of stolen, one-man AT-PT walkers. Their route is lined with turrets and patrolled by tanks, TIE Bombers, and AT-ATs.
• There are a few of these in Shadow of Rome, and they combine being Made of Plasticine and being ponderously slow, in addition to being subject to friendly fire. It's quite common to get stuck on these parts as the people you're supposed to protect get massacred repeatedly. Sometimes by you.
• Shrek 2:
  • In Spooky Forest, after a run-in with a witch ends with the three blind mice reverted from horses to mice, Shrek, Donkey, Fiona and Lil' Red have to escort the mice through the titular forest in search of a magic potion to change them back into horses.
  • One mission in Far Far Away puts the player in charge of escorting Cinderella through a shopping district, protecting her from an army of muggers.
  • To get one snapshot in Walking The Path, the team has to escort Billy Goat to the end of a bridge, though this mission is much easier since you can defeat all of the enemies before doing so.
• Spider-Man: Some of the games have variants on this trope, where the player must protect an NPC from a supervillain.
  • Ultimate Spider-Man (2005): Venom must keep Electro from frying an unconscious Spider-Man, made more bearable by the fact that Spidey's unconscious, and won't do anything stupid, so it'll be only your fault if you let him get roasted alive.
  • Spider-Man (2000) game for the Playstation requires Spider-Man to protect J. Jonah Jameson from a rampaging Scorpion, but fortunately Jameson has the sense to run like hell while the player stalls the Scorpion.
  • Spider-Man: The Movie: At one point, you have to save a random civilian, who, after witnessing you battle a Super Villain, starts talking calmly on his mobile phone and becomes oblivious to the fact that the building you're in is collapsing around him. Then he just stands there while you run around trying to save him. Sure, he's not running into trouble, but he's not running away from it, either.
• These are bread and butter for Starbound, easily making up a third of the randomly generated quests (the other majorities are "Go and kill something", "Help me make friends" and "Help me get a new hat"). The most common ones are that the questgiver's friend or date has gotten themselves lost at some local landmark, or is held captive by some baddies, but some people will want you to help them reach a trader hanging out in hostile territory so they can buy their much-needed cool chair/armor stand/milk carton, and will very likely want to be escorted back home later on. Escortees tend to zig-zag on the uselessness scale; while somewhat slower than the player and with limited ability to navigate around obstacles, they can teleport to your location if their pathfinding fails or you're too far away. They also don't draw aggro until they decide to follow you, so they can hang out in monster-infested rooms or around murderous maniacs without worries, but as soon as they team up with you, they're fair game for everything out to kill you. They also won't follow you into deep liquids, but are okay with wading through shallow ones... which, in the case of lava and poison, is still a death sentence. They also have a tendency to want to stand in the same spot as you, sometimes a bit ahead, even when you're currently fending off an enemy with a melee weapon (and as such, the area in front of you is not a safe one). Fortunately, if the escortee gets killed, you only lose the quest without further punishment, and if they were a tenant of yours, they respawn back home. Additionally, if your escortee carries a weapon, they will help you fight enemies and generally make the mission much easier. (They're still prone to blundering into lava.)
• Lois Lane in Superman 64, like all friendly NPCs in this game, walks at an absurdly glacial pace as you have to escort her out of Lex Luthor's warehouse. Now while a smart player might think this is okay, since you can use that time to scout ahead for enemies, if you let her out of your sight for a few seconds, the game will actually spawn an enemy near her so you have to go back and escort her properly. And when you finally get to the boss fight at the end? She suddenly runs out towards him, getting herself killed and making you start the entire level over^note There are NO checkpoints in this level.
• In Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, there is a section of the game where you have to help Jeff walk to a building after he's severely wounded. During this time, you are slowed down and can only use a pistol, but the section isn't very long and you have covering fire from both Chloe and Elena, making this part of the game quite survivable

Beat 'em Up

• Final Fight: Streetwise has one of the worst. First, you must escort two people, only one of whom can attack, and they both share a lifebar. Second, the escort path is loaded with mooks, including big ones that tend to knock you down and are tough to kill, and ones that carry grenades.
• Samurai Warriors 3 Murasame Mode provides one of the most infuriating escort missions in the game. In the stage that is two away from the end, you have to escort Ayame to "safety" while fending off ridiculously over-powered mooks while she practically CLINGS to you and doesn't even lift so much as a finger to defend herself; to make it all the more frustrating, she runs away and you have to start over if her health is reduced to half.
• Fire Emblem Warriors has an annoying one. To get the second Momento in Chapter 14, the player has to take every fort and get Darios to the castle tower while keeping his health above 80%. However, every enemy can take it down below that with just 2 or 4 hits. Without strong enough characters or weapons to beat enemies quick enough, the player has to gaurd him and let the computer allies get the bases. Not helped by the fact that Darios will keep running off to fight every enemy in the area. Have fun restarting the stage everytime Darios gets so much as a scratch him.
• Two levels in Yakuza 0 have Majima escort Makoto through the streets of Sotenbori to protect her from yakuza gangs that want to kidnap her. There are a number of factors that make these missions not as frustrating as others: since Makoto is blind, Majima is pulling her through the city by the hand and thus the player is allowed to proceed at their own pace. The game adds in a bit of stealth as Majima and Makoto can hide in milling crowds to avoid non-scripted encounters with enemies, and a few of the scripted encounters have Majima give an oh-so-satisfying Neck Snap to some unsuspecting goods in a Quick Time Event. Finally, if/when the two are spotted, the game shifts to a Protection Mission as Makoto cowers and Majima beats the shit out of the yakuza trying to grab her (which can be much easier than it sounds if the player has unlocked Breaker-style moves that allow Majima to rapidly hit crowds of enemies, meaning the player can camp Makoto's position and pummel the yakuza with impunity before moving on).

Driving Game

• Driving the truck with the explosive crate in Driver.

Fighting Game

• In Koei's Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors games, you will fail the mission if your commander dies. Some iterations of the franchise, such as Dynasty Warriors 3, avert this trope - commanders will only engage in battle if they are attacked or if it's just you and them left on the stage. In others, like Warriors Orochi, though, the commander will throw themselves at every enemy general on the map — even Lu Bu — with reckless abandon, turning the game into a series of Escort Missions.
  • Any stage where a NPC has to reach an "escape point" (usually the vicinity of one of the game's reinforcement-mook spawn points) or has to be escorted to the location of an event trigger (most likely a fire attack), or even just has to be picked up along the way.
  • Guan Yu's Escape in Dynasty Warriors 3, 4, and 5 is the Dynasty Warriors series' pure Escort Mission... on the other hand, it's literally right out of the book.
  • There is one level in Dynasty Warriors 3 where your commander decides to close in on the enemy. He'll stay back and avoid the front lines, BY STANDING IN A POISONOUS SWAMP, WHICH SLOWLY DRAINS HIS HEALTH.
  • Lady Cai Wenji in Dynasty Warriors 6 Empires. A series of three escort missions with the same frail escortee. It does not help that at one point, she gets ambushed by at least 3 different officers (pulled at random) and numerous mooks. Bringing along AI allies is NOT a good idea, as it just tends to INCREASE the number of named mooks that appear (bringing along 2P, though, is another story).
    • The one good thing about Lady Cai Wenji is that there's only one of her, and she does tend to haul ass across the field. Unlike the "deliver supplies" missions, in which two separate groups of villagers (an unholy combination of Suicidal Chipmunk since they always run into the bases where enemies respawn, AND wet tissue) are approaching the escape point from opposite sides of the field. Unless you plan the mission well, you'll end up running back and forth frantically trying to prevent them from getting killed. Did I mention that if either one of them dies the mission fails? And that they're frequently ambushed by the Dynasty Warriors equivalent of Goddamned Bats? Scrappy Level doesn't begin to cover it.
  • Some commanders are better than others about not getting in your way, and usually there's some historical precedence as well, most notably Ma Su. Yuan Shao is probably the worst of the bunch, though, since in one battle he just stands there while Lu Bu is coming after him. Luckily, Gongsun Zan and Sun Jian can probably hold Lu Bu off long enough for you and Cao Cao to go around and win the battle.
  • In Dynasty Warriors 6, playing Chang Ban on the Shu side requires that you escort at least one group of defenseless peasants to the docks. Your target for 100% Completion is to escort all four groups of defenseless peasants to the docks, and naturally, they're all way the hell on opposite sides of the field from each other and the terrain is a bitch to navigate.
  • One unfortunate example in Samurai Warriors was Oda Nobunaga at the Battle of Honnouji, an escort mission on the Oda side in the first game. (In the second, you have to defeat Akechi Mitsuhide at the end, when Mori Ranmaru sallies forth.) Like most named NPCs, he wasn't half-bad in combat so long as you remained within "visual range" of him (if far enough away, he'd be subject to morale modifiers), but his AI would absolutely insist on killing any and ALL enemies in an area, even ashigaru (aka the lowest mooks), before proceeding towards the escape point.
  • A most annoying example is Nobutada Oda in Warriors Orochi's Samurai Warriors campaign, mission seven. The mission has a huge map, a metric ton of Mooks and Officers, and contains three powerful bosses — Keiji Maeda, Masamune Date, and Da Ji. You must protect Nobutada, but, instead of staying inside your base where he can be protected easily, he idiotically rushes out of it, usually leading to his untimely demise at the hands of some Mook. Even worse if you're trying to get a thousand kills in order to unlock the final gaiden chapter, since you have to babysit him as well as doing that.
  • As Koei's behind Hyrule Warriors, this comes up there as well. Generally, as with later Dynasty Warriors titles, the linchpin captain usually isn't overly aggressive, but there are still several instances where you'll have to drop everything and bail out required party members. Of particular note is in Cia's side chapters, where a focused assault on Wizzro can result in failing two particular chapters. Why? Because, according to the story, he's going to betray Cia, and he can't do that if he's not alive.
  • Dynasty Warriors: Gundam features several missions requiring you to escort another character to an escape point, and many others where you can't allow them to be shot down. These usually tend to be annoying rather than difficult, as the NPCs aren't so much suicidal as they are more likely to get bogged down clearing out Every. Single. Mook. in the field. The one exception: when a giant mecha cuts you off, your ally is prone to pulling a Leeroy Jenkins no matter how many times he or she gets smacked down by a Beam Spam.
• In Gundam Vs Gundam NEXT Plus, some missions involve protecting a wet tissue of a mech. One grating task involves fending off a barrage of nuclear missiles aimed at Akatsuki. He can't fight back, he only has a pitiful amount of HP, and he is subject to friendly fire rules, so bringing a mech with a Wave-Motion Gun is asking for trouble.
  • Federation vs. Zeon in Campaign mode gives you these every now and again, and the escortee is always either big and unmoving (God help you if you bring a beam weapon to defend these guys, half the damage it takes will be from you shooting it through your targets), or fast but extremely easy to kill. On the plus side, this isn't some sort of Fake Difficulty on the part of the player - you get just as many missions where you're tasked with destroying columns of these sorts of targets, and they're just as fragile as they would be under your care, making these some of the more fun missions.
• The Jump Ultimate Stars protect missions: Imagine a 2D Super Smash Bros. Imagine having a defenseless 'ally' who stands still and dies in a single hit. Imagine having at least two enemies focused on beating the crap out of him from every angle, and starting on either side of him. Imagine having to protect that character for at least 30 seconds to clear that stage and up to a minute to unlock the bonuses and finish the game 100%. It was quite common for the mission to end before the first second was even over.

First-Person Shooter

• Battleborn has two levels, "The Void's Edge" and "The Archive", in which you have to escort Wolf Sentry bots to their objective. These levels are challenging, but not excessively so. The Wolf Sentry bots are heavily armed and armored, and have a very large life bar. They also have the good sense to stop walking upon enemy contact and open fire from maximum range, so you don't have to worry about them walking right into the middle of enemy mobs.
• The various escort missions in Battlezone (1998) and the sequel are generally not too bad, as the escort target is almost always under your direct control, allowing you to order it around to prevent it from taking damage. The first game has your Recycler, a frequent escort target, equipped with Regenerating Health, and the second game often gives you a Service Truck to repair your tank and Recycler. The biggest problem in the first game generally ends up with you running out of ammo and having to hop in one of your escort's tanks.
• BioShock puts you on the other side of this conflict, with the Big Daddies escorting the Little Sisters while they go to harvest ADAM from corpses. You, as the player in both games, will seek to emancipate the Little Sisters from their watchers. Unfortunately, the Big Daddies take offence to this, and will endeavour to either gut you with their enormous drill, stud your brain cavity with rivets, or turn you into hamburger with missile volleys. And then the last level, Proving Grounds, has a rather infamous escort mission: you (in full Big Daddy regalia) lead a Little Sister through a museum that's been converted into a Little Sister training ground, and even though she's been turned back to normal by Tennenbaum, she's still compelled to stop and "gather" at all of the corpses just to make the level harder. Apparently the cure also made her too dumb to stop gathering and hide behind you when she's getting shot, as the real Little Sisters you encountered in the rest of the game did despite being Nigh-Invulnerable. The one upside is that, just like in the rest of the game, there is no real failure state; Tennenbaum has more Little Sisters you can summon from a vent.
  • And then in BioShock 2, you get to be a Big Daddy watching over the Little Sisters. As in the first game, the Sisters are invulnerable and enemy splicers target you instead, and this is simplified further by having the Little Sisters ride on your back instead of wandering around, leaving you free to decide where the two of you get to go.
    • These were always more like a Protection Mission, the Little Sister stays put to collect Adam when she's not on your back, and you normally have time to fortify the perimeter.
  • In BioShock Infinite, Booker DeWitt's goal is to get Elizabeth out of Columbia. However, the game tells you early-on that you don't have to worry about Elizabeth during combat since enemies more or less ignore her and focus more on the player. While Elizabeth doesn't directly fight alongside Booker, she does make herself useful by either tossing him supplies or by using her ability to open Tears to create useful items for him.
• Black Mesa, being a Fan Remake of Half-Life, features the same scientist escort mission seen at the end of "Questionable Ethics". As far as the "escorting" part goes, it's just as painless... not because you may have killed off all opposition, but because the door to the lobby slams shut between Gordon and the scientists before HECU soldiers rope themselves down from the roof. Cue epic gunfight with no escortees to worry about.
• Borderlands 2:
  • When the player meet up with Brick, you must follow him to find and destroy a series of mortar beacons around while a bunch of Hyperion loaders attack. It may seem like you have to protect Brick at first, seeing as how he's unarmed, but it turns out his fists are more than adequate for cutting through the wave of mooks.
  • Brick and Mordecai show up in the final level giving you some assistance against the loaders. However they both suffer a Disney Death soon afterwards, leaving you to fend for yourself. If you happen to quit the game before making it to the checkpoint, you'll realize that you needed their help, as the enemies are so ridiculously powerful that making it back there on your own is a pain in the ass
  • Exploited in Axton's backstory, when he was ordered to escort someone he instead let the guy get captured by enemies, then tracked him to the enemy's base and destroyed the whole place. With the guy he was supposed to be escorting still inside.
• In the Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare mission "Hunted," the informant Nikolai will have to be escorted through a wilderness; fortunately, he's good enough at defending himself with his AK-47u and gains Ally Contractual Immortality (not too shabby for an emaciated guy captured for God-knows-how-long). In the "One Shot, One Kill" mission an injured Captain's support fire is apparently quite effective... however, he can be killed, and he is immobile; he can't move around unless you carry him, leaving you unable to do anything except walk around (no sprinting) and putting him down.
  • Additionally, there's the mission where you "escort" Soap's team... at the controls of an AC-130 gunship. Crowning Escort of Awesome.
  • Later, you actually have to escort an entire army, while taking down hundreds of enemy mechs. Thankfully, you have the hero of the first game to help out.
  • Also, said army can also fight against BAHRAM well enough, although they're pretty well outnumbered.
• The mission "Second Chance" in Call of Duty: Black Ops II is an odd example. You have to rescue an important person and escort them to the evac chopper. The person is about as smart as the rest of your team (read: randomly switches between fairly competent and Leeroy Jenkins) so it's important to guard them well (or order everyone to haul ass to the chopper). Or you can take control of the person rather than escort them and hope they don't die.
• Command & Conquer: Renegade is infamous for two escort missions where the escortees are always ahead of the player: They wait for him at a waypoint and boldly run to the next one when the player catches up to them. However, both escort missions can be handled with a minimum of frustration.
  • Though the first case involves escorting Dr. Moebius, that suit of powered armor he wears puts him on the same level as battleships, major geological formations, and small planets in terms of how little concern he gives for small arms fire (in all seriousness, he can take fire from nearly a dozen enemies armed with tiberium and laser weapons and several ceiling-mounted chainguns for about thirty seconds and only have his health depleted by about a quarter). He actually makes the level easier because his armor lets him tank enemy gunfire and draw it away from you, letting you kill the enemies shooting at him with impunity. Don't hit him though, because friendly fire will shred his armor like paper.
  • The second case is a lot worse because Sydney is unarmed and unarmored, and dies pretty quickly. However, you can run out ahead of her before even getting the escort objective and clear enemies out of the rooms beyond. When you reach the silo, Sydney won't raise the elevators until you step on them, letting you stay on the lower levels and snipe badguys on the upper levels before moving up each floor. So if you fight intelligently, the escort mission becomes pretty easy.
• Counter-Strike:
  • Hostage mode involves the Counter-Terrorists having to try and rescue NPC hostages that have been taken by the Terrorists. If half the living hostages are escorted to a rescue zone, the CTs win. Note the word living, a valid strategy is to just rescue one hostage and then shoot the rest to save yourself the trouble. Or just shoot all the Terrorists and win by default. Or, if you're playing as a Terrorist, shoot all the hostages and turn the round into a deathmatch. Later games tried to fix this: Condition Zero made it so that hostages can escape on their own if not guarded, while Global Offensive made them invincible and reduced the number of hostages from four to two, meaning that only one needs to be rescued to win.
  • 1.6 and Condition Zero feature a couple of "assassination" maps, where one of the Counter-Terrorist team's players is a VIP armed with just a puny little gun, and the rest of them are his escort. As a multiplayer-only game, the VIP's intelligence or stupidity depends on whether the VIP player is a skilled player, a Noob, or God forbid, a Leeroy Jenkins.
• Crysis. The main plot of the first half of the game requires you to rescue several hostages, who are escorted away by allies arriving Just in Time. Any allies you have will stay well away from any fighting and let you do all the work.
• Escort Duty missions in Deep Rock Galactic requires you to escort and protect a Drilldozer (called Doretta) while it homes in on an Ommoran Heartstone that you are trying to recover. The mission manages to avoid most of the issues with escort missions: Doretta moves at a decent pace with occasional stops for refueling, you can repair her if she takes damage (unless she passes one of the breakpoints at each third of her HP), she won't get lost since she just plows through the walls and since the glyphids are mostly coming from one direction (behind you) it's closer to a wave defense mission than an actual escort mission in a lot of ways. And best of all, you don't need to escort her back out after you pick up the Heartstone; apparently the thing is so valuable the company can just leave her there and not lose money. That said, choosing to carry Doretta's head back to the drop pod to save her is a more conventional escort mission: the dwarf carrying her moves slower and can't fire their weapons, requiring the rest of the team to cover them. She can be thrown a short distance, allowing players to pass her between each other when convenient, or throw her further down the path to use their weapons again, but in the end, one player needs to carry her inside the drop pod in order to save her.
• Doom³:
  • You have to escort a scientist carrying a lamp through the demon-infested darkness. The lantern he carries is convenient so you don't have to pull out your own torch, but he's both a poor pace (he'll just keep walking on at constant speed until he notices he's too far from you a good distance away, and only then will he turn back to meet up with you) and a plasticine (the meager Splash Damage of an Imp's fireball kills him). If you do manage to escort him through the whole section, he plods on ahead to the ladder and triggers an ambush where he's killed anyway, forcing you to fight two more Imps than you normally should. The end result is that escorting the dude is such a hassle that it's less of a headache to let the first Imp kill him, or feed him a grenade yourself.
  • Sentry Bots are powerful little buggers who escort you through a few sections of the game. The one time they might actually die, you need to get them to the end of the area anyway and can make more. Updated versions of the game (or those who modded the original PC version) have removed the need to choose between your flashlight and your gun making this completely optional.
• Far Cry:
  • During the closing levels of the game, you're stuck teaming up with Val, who had previously only existed in cutscenes and radio dialogue. The trope is played straight when you actually have her with you. She sticks close, but only stands, which is annoying when you're trying to keep low and use foliage to move undetected, and has a tendency to shoot at enemies the moment she sees them, blowing your cover.
  • The Xbox remake Far Cry Instincts had an even worse one as its penultimate mission. You have to escort Doyle, a One-Hit-Point Wonder, it's dark, he doesn't fight, and he will relentlessly keep going along his predetermined path.
• Avoided in First Encounter Assault Recon, where the Point Man must escort Alice Wade to a helicopter pickup on the rooftop. Alice is invincible, always stays behind the Point Man, and when they ride up the elevator, she stays inside the elevator during the subsequent ambushes. The ambushes themselves can be completely avoided by simply staying inside the elevator, as the Replica soldiers won't throw grenades into it and will stay back behind cover until the doors close and the elevator continues on.
• GoldenEye (1997): One famous example is the 'Protect Natalya' objective, where not only do you have to escort the eponymous character into the Janus base (though she does get to help you with a Cougar Magnum during that phase), but you have to keep her alive by shooting up bad guys while she tries to guide the eponymous satellite into the earth's atmosphere and stop it from destroying London. The first level she appears in is also designed as an escort mission, but thankfully there's an easy way around it: leave Natalya locked in her cell until after you've taken care of all the enemies. Plus, in that level enemies don't shoot her. Even the automatic guns don't touch her. The only person who can shoot her is you.
• The protectees in Half-Life tend to be reasonably close to where you need to take them and you often get a chance to clear out the area before you even meet them; all NPCs can be told to stay put while you went on ahead — and, in the case of the skittish scientists, occasionally did so whether you wanted them to or not ("I refuse to take another step!") In the expansion Half-Life: Opposing Force and from Half-Life 2 on, mission-critical characters (besides the scientists in Opposing Force) were often more than capable of defending themselves.
• Half-Life 2:
  • Episode 1 and 2 both pair the player off with Alyx Vance, a NPC sidekick who is Nigh-Invulnerable. She can still be killed if the player makes absolutely no attempt to fight the enemy at all (or inadvertently blunders too far away from her, given the difference in firepower between her and Gordon Freeman). She hangs back or is otherwise separated from the player for large boss battles. It's even worse if you're going for the achievement "One Free Bullet" where you're not allowed to use anything besides your crowbar, gravity gun, grenades, and RPG. All of which do low damage or have limited ammo.
  • The penultimate level of Half-Life 2: Episode One has you escorting groups of citizens to a train leaving City 17. There's no penalty for letting one die other than some admonishment from their peers and missing out on an achievement, although letting an entire group (which sometimes only comprises two) die means having to do that round over. Some are also armed and mostly competent, and the biggest annoyance is that they're sometimes too eager to fight back even if they're two meters from the goal and Alyx is right there with her mounted gun. Also, the first group encounters no resistance at all, leading Alyx to say "Well, that wasn't so hard. We should have brought everyone over at once."
• Halo:
  • The end of the "Truth and Reconciliation" level in Halo: Combat Evolved lampshades this in the sublevel title ("Shut Up And Get Behind Me... Sir"). The scene was less odious than many escort missions, as Captain Keyes is able to fight back and usually has enough sense not to get in the way, but it is still one of the more exasperating fighting sequences in the game.
  • The Banshee/Scarab sequence in the final mission of Halo 2. It's even possible to fly the Banshee into the interior of the Scarab, which makes this mission much simpler. Why did you even need to escort the thing in the first place?
  • Halo 3: ODST features another escort mission in the endgame, of a Covenant Engineer housing an AI. It has enough health to not become a hassle, and gives you a layer of shields if you stick nearby.
  • In several missions in Halo: Reach, you're tasked with the survival of civilians. Luckily, their survival isn't actually mission critical, considering they have no sense of self-preservation. The militiamen in the mission "Nightfall" will blow themselves up if given the rocket launcher, stand right under enemy dropships, and bum rush Hunters. In your first escort mission with them, they usually get wiped out right at the start.
  • The VIP multiplayer game type in later games is also an escort mission in most forms: one player on one or every team is the "VIP." Depending on the specific game type, the VIP will have different characteristics, and in some cases gives nearby teammates a boost.
  • Technically speaking, you're actually doing this most of the time in the mainline games: In Halo: The Fall of Reach, the Spartans were told they'd receive a hacking escort for a mission. They immediately objected on the grounds that, civilian or elite soldier, they couldn't possibly keep up with a Spartan. Cue Cortana, your trusty AI companion who's usually safe inside your armor.
• Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast has multiple instances.
  • Jan needs to be escorted a couple times in the levels before you gain Force powers, but except for one time when she's attacked before she can regroup with you, she's not in any serious danger.
  • The last two of the aforementioned levels have, respectively, an Imperial officer you hold at gunpoint and a bunch of escaped prisoners. The former is only endangered by some of those annoying crabs at one point, and after he opens the door you need him to open, he calls in an ambush and attacks you. The prisoners manage to hold their own against stormtroopers, but when they call in an AT-ST, you have to find a turret and destroy it before it can kill them all.
  • There are brief sections in a level where you have to protect Lando. At the end, it's more of a general defense mission, but to start with you're running around the map together.
  • The next level after the above, you need an R5 unit to survive long enough to open two doors. The droid stops once, before both doors, and after that will not change direction, pause, slow down, or do anything that suggests that it has a sense of self-preservation. Oh, and the hallway between the two doors has five or six snipers and enough trip-laser mines to blow the droid away ten times over^note This one particular instance has a trick to it. While the R5 is single-minded, he can be properly maneuvered by the player. Namely, by Force Push and Force Pull.
• In episode 2 of Ken's Labyrinth, you have to escort your dog Sparky to the end of the level. The "invulnerable" designation is partially subverted because while neither enemy bullets nor your own bullets can harm Sparky, he can fall down a hole, and everything that falls down a hole dies.
• Left 4 Dead 2 has you getting cola to the gun shop owner so he can clear a path for you. If you get the cola, you are escorted by your team mates as they protect you from the infected rushing in to attack. If someone else gets the cola, you have to protect them. The roles can easily switch if someone fumbles the cola or passes it to someone else.
  • In the Dark Carnival level of Left 4 Dead 2, you can play one of the carnival games and, if you score high enough, win a prize of a lawn gnome. If you manage to get the gnome (named Gnome Chompsky) to the end of the level, you get a special achievement. Since one of your party members has to carry the gnome in lieu of a weapon, this winds up being an ersatz escort quest of sorts for whoever is gnome-carrier, although he can be dropped and exchanged for a weapon at any time, then picked back up after carnage has ensued.
• Medal of Honor:
  • Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
    • The second half of Sniper's Last Stand has you escorting a tank crew through a town full of nigh-invisible hitscan snipers.
    • You are assigned to escort Grillo once again, but he gets gunned down at the beginning of the mission.
    • In the first level of Underground, Manon has to escort her brother Jacques, but he gets killed at the end of the level before he can complete his objective.
  • In Medal of Honor: Frontline's Rough Landing level, you have to protect Cpl. Barnes while he blows up tanks. Both he and the Redshirt that accompanies you tend to charge straight into the fray. If Barnes dies at any time, even after he completes his objective, you fail.
  • Underground has one as the first level, as you have to escort the Action Girl protagonist's brother through the Nazi and Milice-infested streets of night-time Paris to get to an ammo dump. Thankfully it's mercifully easy as he's tough enough to survive several hits, has an MP-40 (which is a much better weapon than your dinky little pistol) and he pulls headshots with it fairly reliably. You only really need to jump in and protect him whenever he bends over to pick the lock on a door.
• Metro 2033 has a wide variety of such escort missions:
  • When you're traveling with Bourbon or Khan, it's more of a Reverse Escort Mission: they're invulnerable and can easily deal with the mutants you get into a fight with, while Artyom struggles because of poor equipment or shortages of ammunition.
  • In a short but intense section at the start of the journey to D6, where you're tasked with protecting Vladimir, a tech, from a Nosalis attack. It's not so bad in that he is decently durable and usually hangs around far in the back, and by this point you're free to fire off those shiny pre-war 5.45mm rounds you were using as money while there were still shops, which are ideal to trounce the mutants with.
  • The third instance is not nearly as pleasant: further into D6, Miller's Gameplay Ally Immortality is disabled and you have to protect him from giant amoebas. His Volt Driver is strong enough to One-Hit Kill the amoebas and he's not quite Made of Plasticine, but he's a poor pace escortee in that he just keeps walking, the Volt Driver has a poor fire rate so he can only deal with a few amoebas at a time, and worse, he completely ignores the pores said amoebas spawn from (which are even more of a pain in that they require exactly eight shots to destroy regardless of weapon damage, so if you don't have something with high ROF like a Kalash 2012, you're boned). The only way to guarantee that the dumb bastard survives is to rush ahead of him while keeping that trigger pressed to mow down everything in your way, especially the damn pores; in the first part it's at least made less painful in that if you rush fast enough, Miller's AI won't receive the command to move forward and into amoeba territory until you get within a certain range, giving you time to clear the whole way at your leisure.
  • The final stretch of the game is another escort mission with Miller, except he's invulnerable again. The main problem stems from the sheer amount of Watchmen rushing you two, and Miller can only engage one at a time; it's made worse in that, being an outdoors level, you depend on your gasmask, which the Watchmen can eventually break, and there's only one replacement near the end in a not-very-obvious spot.
• The PC (and GBA) port of the game NightFire. The player must protect Mayhew, an unarmed man, but he's smart enough to stay behind you and not move on until an area is cleared.
• No One Lives Forever parodies this in a sniping Escort Mission with a nearly blind and nearly deaf NPC so oblivious that he doesn't even realize he's being escorted, even when enemies start shooting at him from mere feet away. Since he doesn't realize he's in a firefight, he doesn't bother taking cover. Even worse, he'll often walk straight at enemies thinking the sound of their shells bouncing off the floor is a dime.
• Overwatch has Escort game mode, which works similarly to Team Fortress 2's Payload mode: one team must escort the target vehicle to the enemy base before time runs out, while the second tries to stop them. The vehicle is invincible and heals nearby attackers, but only moves if at least one of them is nearby and there are no defenders in range. There's also Hybrid mode, which combines this with Assault mode - instead of starting right next to the attackers, the payload starts at a certain distance from them and must be captured before it can be pushed.
  • Overwatch 2 introduced a new spin on the concept with a game mode called Push: at the center of the map is a robot that both teams are fighting for in order to seize control. Whichever team gains control of the robot causes it to push a barricade on a path towards their enemy spawn, but said enemies can wrestle control away and send it pushing another barricade towards the opposite direction. The goal is to achieve the higher total distance in favor of your team before the time runs out, but managing to push the robot all the way to the end of the path also grants immediate victory.
• Paladins has Seige, which combines Payload and King Of The Hill into one map, similar to Overwatch. It differs as the team who captures the central point first pushes a payload to the enemy teams' base, and as such, the maps are accommodated for this purpose. A more traditional "Payload" game mode was also included as part of the games' Open Beta, but was removed in OB50.
• PAYDAY 2 continues this with the variation that too many cops around won't stop your escort anymore - now they either stop at set intervals until you can clear the way (the truck carrying Hoxton in day 1 of "Hoxton Breakout"), or at completely random times regardless of police opposition (the drunk pilot from "White Xmas").
• PAYDAY: The Heist has a few levels where you must escort an important person to a specified location. While the escorts cannot be harmed, they will refuse to move when there's too many cops attacking nearby.
• In Perfect Dark, a mission in which the player must escort the President of the United States through a hostile traitorous NSA-controlled Air Force One becomes greatly problematic for many reasons. In addition to having a penchant for running aimlessly into walls, the President is also commonly killed if the player doesn't first escort him to an escape pod before attempting to complete another mission objective... which is to set explosives on the Skedar warship that has latched onto the aircraft. While the player is aware that the explosion is dangerous, the President, on the other hand, does not. This is made even worse as this section of the level is a Timed Mission.
  • The following mission, where Air Force One crash lands and you have to escort the President to an extraction point, is even worse. He simply loves to run in front of your semi-automatic rifle while you're sniping someone far away.
  • Dr. Caroll becomes your escort in a couple of missions. Plotwise, he is a very smart AI, but as far as game programming goes, he has very little spatial awareness and can be torn apart by anyone with a CMP150. He generally does try to stay behind you, but on higher difficulties there is very little time between seeing "Dr. Caroll is under attack" and "Dr. Caroll has been killed!"
  • There is also the chapter where, as Mr. Blonde, you must find and "escort" Cassandra to the helipad. While the area between her and the helipad isn't too large and enemies don't actively go after her, one of the enemies has a N-Bomb that will easily kill Cassandra if he throws it. Not only that, but Cassandra will often ruin your aim as she runs right in front of you, and considering how fragile she is, you'll most likely kill her if you accidentally hit her.
    • The trick to that level was to go upstairs and clear out all the enemies first, then come back and get Cassandra once the coast was clear. You'd have to do the whole stage pretty quickly to make it to the end before the time limit was up (especially on Perfect Agent), but it saved you a lot of headache in the long run.
  • Any level where the player is accompanied by Jonathan or Elvis also amounts to an escort mission. They're ostensibly there to help you, but they're dumb as hell and it's game over if they die. Jonathan, in Area 51 - Escape, doesn't really bother to run after you, instead staying behind to try and clear out the enemies coming after you two, and since all he has is a DY357 Magnum, it takes him a while to get it done with, forcing you to speed things along if the Superdragon-armed enemies, who have a tendency to get packed together at this point of the level, don't mow him down first.
• Escortees in Quake IV typically stand in the line of fire or bumrush Strogg squads, getting themselves shot to pieces, and don't stand a chance against fast bruisers like Berserkers and Grunts.
  • In Level 4 of Quake IV, you escort a demolitions expert carrying explosives that will detonate if hit by weapons fire. "If these puppies go off, they'll take out you, me, and half this mountain." Later, you have to protect the same demolitionist from several waves of Grunts and Berserkers while he disarms landmines.
• Escortees in Soldier of Fortune II and Payback like to run blindly ahead of you before you've cleared the way.
  • In the second level of Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, you have to escort Dr. Ivanovich out of the hotel. He dies very quickly, and if that happens, it's an instant Game Over.
• The Starship Troopers FPS game has a number of horrendously annoying escorts where your engineer decides that the computer/fence/etc in the middle of the bug horde needs to be repaired.
  • Dealing with Genera Hauser isn't all that bad though, as he knows when the waves of bugs are coming and rarely gets in the way.
• Some Team Fortress 2 servers have the "Spy Crab Migration" mission, where one team is made up of Spies who must use the Spy Crab glitch (crouching and looking up with the disguise kit open) to make it to the other side of the field, and the other teams is full of Huntsman-weilding Snipers whose job it is to prevent the same. Since only one Spy Crab has to make it to the end for the Spy side to win, some people play it like an Escort Mission. Some maps make this harder for one side or another by adding instant death traps (like high voltage power lines for the Spy Crabs, or the Train of Death for the Snipers).
• Team Fortress 2's "Payload" mode has one team have to lead a mine cart carrying a bomb through a predetermined path to the other team's base. However, it moves slowly, and only moves when a member of the team pushing it is nearby. If no one pushes it for 30 seconds (or if it's let go of while on an incline, in some of the newer maps), it starts going backwards. However, it's the escorter that finds themselves being shot at, and if the player is on the other team, the goal is to get the escort mission to fail. The bomb itself is completely invulnerable, is useful as cover (as most classes can still keep up with it while crouched), and even dispenses health and ammo. Players are also just as capable of "pushing" it by standing on top or even in front of it. Many players consider it to be the best mode in the game.
  • Later, the game got a mode called "Payload Race", where both teams have to push a cart of their own and fend the other team's cart.
  • The "End of the Line" fan-made update introduced a map called "Snowplow". It's similar to Payload where a team must lead a full-sized train to the end of the track while the other team must prevent it from reaching the end, with the difference that the train can be damaged by traps laid in the tracks. The attacking team must disable these traps by standing on points, while the defending team must protect these points so the traps keep damaging the train until it breaks.
  • Finally, there's the Game Mod known as Stop That Tank!, where the payload has been replaced with the Tank boss from Mann vs. Machine mode. It moves on its own, and the BLU team is now entirely robots tasked with stopping RED from destroying the tank. Should RED succeed in destroying the tank, the topscoring BLU players can turn into Giant Robots and carry another bomb, capturing any remaining control points along the way.
• Team Fortress Classic has an oft-overlooked gamemode called Hunted, wherein one player is the 'civilian' (an utterly useless class whose weapon is an umbrella) and the defending team (with a limited class selection) must protect him against the offending team, which is made up of snipers.
  • Quake Team Fortress had similar custom maps. One in particular featured three teams: one full of civilians with axes trying to get to the other side of the map before time ran out, one team of two people armed with explosives trying to kill all the civilians, and one team of two people trying to help the civilians by killing the second team. The civilians usually had unlimited respawns, but always had very low health. It was messy.
• Tron 2.0 has infuriating sequences where one must guard Ma3a while she does something. This is annoying when she basically tells you "Go up into that tower and shoot anyone who comes near me" At that point, the LOL (basically a sniper rifle) takes up the most weapon energy of your weapons and no quick way of replenishing weapon energy. Another is set at the Progress Bar where you must guard Ma3a while the Tron Legacy program is compiled into her. Infected programs come after her near constantly and she gets assailed by some sort of mega-virus.
  • Later in the game, Jet is also escorting his father through cyberspace hell. Alan does have the good sense to duck or otherwise stay out of the way for the most part, but he's got laughably low hit points which means that he can't take a single hit without game over.
• XIII has General Carrington, who insists on standing in the open taking on the AK-toting baddies with his pistol and getting cut to ribbons; frustration is alleviated slightly by his being a cigar-chomping Father to His Men voiced by Adam West, so at least there's some Plucky Comic Relief factor.

Hack and Slash

• Any time you have to escort someone in Diablo III, they won't have a lifebar under their portrait, indicating that they do not take damage. Some escortees will even attack for you, if with negligible damage output compared to what you can do.
• In Evil Dead: Regeneration, Ash's half-demon midget sidekick Sam generally makes himself useful by weakening enemies - when he isn't being used to collect Plot Coupons. Then you have to keep him from being killed before feeding enough Plot Coupons to the demon blocking your way until it goes to sleep.

Mecha

• The second stage of Armored Hunter Gunhound EX, but rather than escorting a person to safety, players must escort a supply of neutron polymer while protecting it from the enemy. Clearing the stage gives a bonus for each one that survives however the game will be over if all of them are left to be destroyed.

MMORPG

• Anarchy Online has a few:
  • Sector 28 has the Rookie Alien Hunter, who the raid force must accompany in this sector. The raid force cannot pass gates without him going through them first. He may be tough to kill, but he tends to be full of himself. Also, careful if you provoke him, as he may attack back.
  • The Dark Ruins in Adonis has Cultist Loke. Every other time he stops, spirits ambush him, and you must protect him so he can reach the spirit guide. Unlike the Rookie Alien Hunter, Loke is delicate, and if he dies during the trip, the instance must be restarted. When he reaches the spirit guide, the spirit guide kills him anyway.
  • Alappaa has Sheila Marlene, who was thawed from an ice obelisk on the opposite side. The team must escort her to the emtrance, and prepare for ambushes. She does join in, but her contributions are negligable, and she can fight any team member who attacks her. When arriving at the entrance, the old man, who claims to be her father, turns into a monster when she rejects him. Unlike Loke, she can survive after the end.
• Battlestar Galactica Online has some plotline missions where you need to defend a Raptor or Heavy Raider, but the things are reasonably durable. You can also invert this trope! You may randomly encounter Freighters belonging to the other side with their escort complement that you can blow away.
• City of Heroes:
  • This can be an occasional problem, caused by the running speed of the player being incredibly variable. Some builds aren't able to go slower than thirty mph at a light jog, and can easily lose the NPC repeatedly. There is a "walk" power, but nobody uses it because... well, it's too slow. Most NPCs will at least call out when they've lost you.
  • There's also one weird version of this which can happen (still happening as of November 2011) if an escortee is targeting an enemy which teleports out of the area... and decides to pursue said enemy (the AI can track even long-range teleports, which players can at best get a general direction). This results in the escortee unexpectedly taking off for a probably unexplored and populated region of the map, and possibly making jumps some players can't copy.
  • In one of the Midnighter Arc missions, you have to meet with an NPC named Lady Jane in a tunnel system (filled with Circle of Thorns demons and mages) under Steel Canyon, and then escort her to a chest located somewhere else in the tunnels. The problem is, every time Lady Jane gets within sniffing distance of a horde of bad guys, she whips out her pistols and starts blasting away. And if the bad guys run, she chases them... thus aggroing all the other hordes around her. And if she dies, the mission is over.
  • This is so bad that some players just take the hit, fail the mission on purpose, and move on because in the long run, Lady Jane's survival is not relevant to your success in the rest of the mission arc. Other players would run, teleport, etc right past the group holding her captive, clear out the rest of the mission, and only come back for her once it's safe.
  • There's also General Z, in the mid-level Sky Raiders arc named for him. While sturdier than Lady Jane, he has a similar habit of running at squads of renegade soldiers armed only with a .45. He's pretty badass, but not that Badass.
  • In one of the rescue missions, the hostage, upon being rescued, says "I will follow you to the exit", and then runs off. Turns out his translation system is having trouble, and he's quite capable of making his own way to the door.
• In Dungeon Fighter Online your character must escort an old man (GSD) through a tower of darkness. The catch? This old man is probably the most badass character in the game that is more capable of wrecking the enemy's shit than you are. Note that GSD is not only 40 levels higher than all of the monsters in the stage, but has all the skills that a level capped Asura would have, but also with no cooldown.
• Final Fantasy XI:
  • There's one mission in which not only must the (underpowered and at least somewhat suicidal) escortee survive, but if at any time he sees you, you fail the mission.
  • Made even worse in Mission 42 of the Treasures of Aht Urhgan expansion—an escort mission so horrible, in fact, that it overlaps with Escorting Plasticines, Escorting Leeroy Jenkins, and Annoying Video Game Helper! The fact that it's the second-to-last storyline battle in the expansion makes it even more frustrating.
• Final Fantasy XIV has two kinds of escort missions. Escort leves are actually fairly harmless (see Exceptions, below). Escort FATEs are another story. Any player can set one off by talking to a randomly-spawning NPC; the NPC then blithely heads off along a predetermined path, often through crowds of monsters, and at specific points on the path they will stop dead and make a quip, cueing further spawns out of nowhere. None of these NPCs make the slightest effort to defend themselves, avoid threats, or get out of the way of attacks. They also walk at a speed that could be outrun by ketchup, except for the random moments where they break into a sprint.
• Final Fantasy XIV has two types of escort quests. The first are escort leves, where you have to escort an NPC to a specific location. Amazingly, the routes chosen avoid random monsters and NPC takes no action except to obey the "beckon" order; as long as you don't try to go too quickly, you can clear out all the monsters before they even get near your charge. If only escort FATEs were the same way...
• In the MMORPG for Gaia Online, one quest has you find a rather ditzy girl who somehow has wandered onto a high cliff in the middle of a jungle. While she follows you back to the entrance, she herself cannot be hurt and enemies don't target her at you. This means that you just have to concentrate on staying alive, because if you have to leave the area, then you have to find her again.
• Guild Wars:
  • The reason Prince Rurik was so painful to escort was that Rurik's behavior changed within missions. For the most part he followed the players but at certain points he would hit a trigger which makes him run along a pre-determined path regardless of the players. These paths often led him through or near multiple enemy groups; unless parties were aware of when this occurred he could easily outpace them and end up dead.
  • Of special note are several missions where you must escort an NPC that will charge heedlessly into battle shouting his name, "Kiiiiillroooooy Stooooonekiiiiin!!". Not only is the character a hilarious homage to the Leeroy Jenkins video, but his shout is also a gamebreaking buff that cuts your skill costs and cooldowns in half.
  • It was finally fixed in Guild Wars: Eye of the North; whenever you are accompanied by NPCs in a dungeon or on a mission, they regularly get hacked down without mercy — but automatically resurrect with no ill effects as soon as the area is clear of enemies.
• Guild Wars 2 modified the previous approach where a downed escortee must be revived by a player or another NPC. They are effectively immortal, making failure likely only if the player cannot defeat the attacking enemies.
• Kingdom of Loathing:
  • In June 2011, the game finally got an escort mission, as part of a quest involving space elves living on Loathing's moons unlocked by the Li'l Xenomorph familiar. The little blonde elf girl you're escorting is in fact unattackable, and you're in no serious danger — the monsters scale to your level and should be consistently beatable. The problem is that Axel Ottal, your escortee, has issues with you bleeding and tends to run off screaming if you get hurt too much, requiring you to be specifically prepared to fight monsters whose combat ability scales to yours without getting hit. (Although it turns out she's running off to protect you from herself, as she's really a xenomorph resisting the urge to eat you.) The trope is lampshaded anyway:
  Player: Wait, so you mean, I have to escort you there?
  Axel: (nods, smiling in a way that curdles your blood) Uh-huh. And I'm real fragile, and I'm real likely to run off and get myself killed. But we ought to hurry. It's gonna be dark soon, and the mean men chiefly hunt at night. Chiefly.
  • The trope also gets parodied upon rescuing the grandma See Monkee:
  Player: I'm just here to escort you back to the Sea Monkee Castle. Grandpa Sea Monkee asked me to find you.
  Grandma: You're going to escort me? That's wonderful! I mean, I'm a little slow, and I'm sure I'd be useless in a fight, and I'll probably get lost over and over and you'll have to double back and find me, and I can't get over even the smallest obstacle, but I'd love to have you escort me!
  Player: Huh. On second thought, can you find your own way back? I think I've thinned out the Mer-kin enough for you to get back okay.
  Grandma: Oh, that'll be fine, dearie. Don't you worry about me — this Grandma's still got some life left in her old bones!
  Player: Phew, that was a close one.
• Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes, sequel to Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders, has a level where you have to escort an elf with a particularly dim AI across a desert to find an artifact. This wouldn't be a problem, but across the middle of the map, there is a giant war going on between two forces, making it a hassle to get through them. Not only does this elf have extremely limited combat skills, he loves to charge into enemy Swamp Mammoths, getting killed instantly, and ending the level. In addition to having to babysit this NPC the entire level, you are also under constant bombardment from enemy mortars, archers, and mages, making your process to the other side of the map incredibly arduous. If you manage to make sure that your escort didn't run into the multitudes of enemy forces, and you managed to get to the location of the artifact alive yourself, you now have to face off against four incredibly difficult Fire Wraiths. Good luck with that.
• The Lord of the Rings Online:
  • At the end of one of the early chapters in the epic storyline, your character has to escort an old lady named Sara Oakheart from some bandit caves. Trouble is, she's slow as dirt, meaning you have no chance of getting out without fighting every last bandit in the cave. (But then again, it would be unrealistic for an ordinary senior citizen to be able to keep up with a well-trained warrior...)
  • Sara shows up in some later epic storyline missions as well. In one of them, she runs around actively opening doors with clusters of enemies trapped behind them. Her pacing here is particularly annoying because she moves slowly (or not at all) through enemy-filled areas, but as soon as you've downed the last one, she's off like a shot to open the door to the next, usually leaving you disoriented for a few precious seconds while you try to figure out which way she ran off and get to her before the group she's just released kills her. Luckily, protecting her is usually optional, and you can let her die with no consequences other than failing the optional objective.
  • There's a plot-related reason to hate "Sara Oakheart" as well, but by the time you find out what it is, her "slower than molasses" or "suicidal Kenyan on meth" pacing in the (several) escort missions you've done for her will have rendered it entirely superfluous.
  • Justified later on when you find out that the character really was trying to interfere with your mission. The slow-walking and distractions are to prevent you from stopping Amdir and she runs away at top speed once he's gotten away. So, it's the character trolling you as much as the developers. Why does the player put up with this? Well, the rest of the game basically treats your character like a passive door-mat in regards to NPC shenanigans, so it's not entirely out of the ordinary.
  • In one mission you have to rescue a trader named Pengail from some Goblins. He tried plying his wares with them only to end up a prisoner. When you go to rescue the fool, he insists on searching every goblin camp in the vicinity for his father's sword instead of running to safety. Naturally, you search through five different camps, assuming you can keep him alive, only to find the sword in the last one.
  • There's also a quest in the Barrow-Downs that has you escorting a little hobbit-girl through the Downs. She takes you into some of the most populous spots in the area (not that the Downs isn't fairly well covered in hostile creatures anyways) looking for her coat, turns even the small number of non-aggressive creatures hostile while you're on the quest, and even spawns extra enemies along the way.
  • There's a quest chain where you are escorting an orc prisoner name Mazog. He will deliberately run you into every hazard he can find, trying to get you killed so that he can escape. After completing several "legs" of one quest, he'll suddenly run away from you, trying to get to the next objective before you do. If he does, he'll kill the person you're supposed to meet, and you'll have to start over. Oh, and you're not told where the objective is, exactly; just given some markers you need to look for. Plan on starting this quest over at least once.
    • It's also interesting that he'll only kill the NPC because he catches them unaware. Despite the fact the NPC is an elf, and Mazog is a manacled orc in armor splashing through a swamp at full run.
  • Another one involves protecting the captain of a squad of mercenaries while you fight off droves (literally over TWO HUNDRED) monsters and keeping her alive — problem is, if she sees or hears monsters nearby, she will go and attack them. Your safest bet is to hide her in a corner of the fort facing a wall and guard the two entrances to keep anything from getting through. A second one involves keeping a stupendously weak wizard from dying while you escort him through an entire chain of quests — fortunately, you can whack him over the head to set him straight, and if he does die, you can just start over the current quest.
  • Another quest (The Weapon Shipment) has a part at the beginning where you escort a mage to an area where you have to fight off many enemies (several hundred on elite, making it extremely difficult without crowd control). This isn't the worst part, because the mage can't die then, but the mage tends to run through the beginning area, meaning your party has to rush to make sure she doesn't die, especially on elite.
• In Perfect World, high levels generally "escort" lower levels through their dungeons. Just a bit of friendly advice for you... If you're a high-level Axe Blademaster on a PvP server, and you're helping somebody level 30 and up, don't use Heaven's Flame.
• In Phantasy Star Online, the player could be hired by a scientist named Mome who wanted to study the lifeforms native to one of the sections of the game... which involved dragging him through the entire dungeon, including the boss battle. Mome didn't fight and had about as much endurance as a wet tissue, and his death meant that the mission was a failure and you would have to start all the way from the beginning. Sega acknowledged the players' frustration in Version 2 by having him voluntarily play dead during the boss battle.
  • A few also show up in the Spiritual Successor, Phantasy Star Universe. Most aren't as infuriating — helped by the fact that their dying just hurts your end-of-mission rating, instead of ending the mission as a failure — but the one in Chapter 10 of Story Mode is quite annoying, if for the sole reason that one of the escortees is Karen... who was a capable fighter and ally earlier in the game, but is now as fragile as wet tissue paper and barely capable of using her weapons.
• RuneScape:
  • "Blood Runs Deep" has you escort King Vargas throughout a series of caves full of dagganoths. He is explicitly stated to be wounded, so he moves slowly. The good news is that the monsters will ignore him and focus on you, except for one of the caves. The worst part is where you are in the cave that is just before a trio of bosses called the Dagganoth Kings (you don't actually go in there during the quest, just near the cave), where you're getting blasted by all sorts of dagganoths, rock lobsters, and magical walruses. All while waiting for Vargas to catch up.
  • In a minigame called Temple Trekking/Burg de Rott Ramble, you escort refugees out of a country that is ruled by vampires, or escort mercenaries to the front lines. They go down in a few hits, and actively try to fight enemies, even though they themselves say before the trek that they aren't good fighters. The hard escortees unlock the ability to tell you what enemies you face on each path pretty quickly, but they need it. If you get snails, the hard escorts fail. Period.
• Star Trek Online has a few escort missions in its storylines, and the ship is invariably slower than molasses in January. Thankfully it's invincible.
• Several times in Star Trek Online; however, the example that stands out the most is that of Admiral Zelle. Admiral Zelle is unarmed and follows you through an allegedly dangerous Romulan base. However, the Romulans shout that they're not warriors, but scientists, and when you reach the central computer, it's clear that this was a Medical Research Base, not a military outpost. Of course, by this point, the woman in charge of the base is dead - and Admiral Zelle reveals herself to be a Species 8472/Undine infiltrator, who thanks you and takes the woman's identity so that the Undine can manipulate the Romulans into war. Indeed... Oftentimes, the invulnerable NPC's behavior in the level can be quite indicative of their general character.
  • This gets aggravating because the player(s) can suspect that something extremely fishy is happening. Nominally being Starfleet Captain(s) (well, commanding a ship, anyway,) they should be able to pull the "it's my ship, I'm relieving you of duty and locking you in my brig" card and terminate the mission; or, if they want to Sisko it, step back and let Admiral Zelle charge on ahead, into mooks, and get killed. Except that she's invulnerable.
• Lampshaded in the MMORPG Tabula Rasa; an escort mission specifically tells you the NPC has gone nuts and is about to blindly charge a huge enemy lair, and your job is to escort her to the entrance.
• World of Warcraft:
  • Escort missions were incredibly frustrating, especially in Classic and Burning Crusade. The escortees would move frustratingly slow, to the point where even if the player cleared the route of monsters beforehand, they had a tendency to respawn while the escort quest was underway. Every time combat started, the escortee would race toward the mob at light speed. When said monster was killed, the escortee would race back to its starting point (even if it was way behind you) pause, and slowly resume its slow march toward freedom.
  • Poor lost tauren Pao'ka Swiftmountain, who wandered into a Wyvern nest in Thousand Needles and needs your help to get out. He's relatively durable, but he's very slow (presumably because he hasn't eaten since he got lost) and the mobs are plentiful.
  • There is an escort quest inside Razorfen Kraul. Unlike most escort quests the player has experienced, he will take off running instead of walking like most other escorts. And if you fall too far behind him, you fail the quest — even if you later catch up and successfully defend him from monsters. Entirely new kind of screwing the player up.
  • Horde players will find a blood elf in the Den of Haal'esh in Hellfire Peninsula who needs to be freed and escorted back to the nearest settlement. The required distance is perhaps the longest of any similar quest, and of course, she walks unbelievably slowly. To make matters worse, she will draw the attention of all of the tightly-packed enemies on the way out of the den and will be ambushed several times on the long road back. Due to NPC speed being different than PC speed, this becomes a problem in every escort quest, though the examples given are indeed standouts. The only thing that works to match PC and NPC speeds is for a PC to ride a basic mount at a walk. Some later escort quests avert this by having the NPC follow the player rather than travel at a predetermined pace.
  • A memorable one is in Grizzly Hills; a little girl and her pet rabbit have wandered too far from home and need your help to get back. Fair enough. The most aggravating part isn't even that the quest is bugged, and dear Mr Floppy can get himself killed through no fault of yours. Oh no. Emily manages to set the tone for the next little while (and indeed virtually all escort quests) when she initially looks like she's heading for the road, and then veers off into the forest. The entire quest consists of guiding some suicidal moppet and her pet past bears and wolves while still in clear view of the road.
  • Magwin on Azuremyst Isle, who despite knowing that the forest on the small sub-island is full of vicious moonkin and the beach to her house on the other side of the island is almost uninhabited, she still opts to walk through the woods.
  • Lampshaded with one quest in the late-game area of Uldum. You are asked to accompany Brann Bronzebeard to The Halls of Origination, which is a long walk from where you are. He starts walking ... slooooooowly ... in that direction. Before you've gone 20 paces, he announces he needs to stop for a rest and pauses for a moment. Then starts walking for a few more paces ... and stops. Again. Then he begins laughing uproariously and says, "Ah the old slow-walk trick. Gets 'em every time. I'll meet you there." and runs off. This is also a Shout-Out to his appearance in the Halls of Stone. Early on, he would walk at an infuriatingly slow pace to his destination; it was later patched to make him a bit more spry.
  • The quest "Moozy's Reunion" in Highmountain is basically a parody of an escort mission. You have to walk a mildly annoying old lady somewhere... slowwwly. Halfway through, she shows she doesn't need an escort for safety by shooing away the only attacking monster in the quest. (So this example could go to a couple of the other types of escort mission as well.) The next expansion adds her race as a playable option. One of their jokes is to comment that the old lady is actually a very fast walker; she just does this to mess with tourists.
  • One of the worst escorts in the game is a Night Elf druid at Firewatch in Terrokar Forest. The area is densely packed with several groups of mobs, that quickly respawn so it's difficult to clear the area before hand. She will charge in, aggro a group, and then veer off to a completely different group. And she apparently didn't train any healing spells.
  • Face it, this has also happened in random dungeons. With random, real-life players.
  • Post-Cataclysm Hillsbrad Foothills parodies this by having the player escort an NPC who is designed to act like a typical n00b player. He will gleefully rush any enemy that comes anywhere near him, hostile or otherwise. After a few seconds he will realise he is in trouble and scream for help, before repeating the procedure for the next enemy. Luckily you don't have to escort him far and the enemies are deliberately spread out enough to accommodate his Suicidal Overconfidence.
  • The Warlords of Draenor revamp of Upper Blackrock Spire adds an optional escort mission for the Leeroy Jenkins. Yes, they added him as an NPC as an homage to the original video. He behaves as you would expect, and there is actually an achievement for keeping him alive despite his Suicidal Overconfidence, which rewards him as a garrison follower.
    • Notably, he is both a Leeroy Jenkins and Made of Plasticine. He's level 60 in a level 100 zone, so he'll both aggro anything still alive along his path and die to one hit. The only real way to get the achievement is by killing everything before he finishes his chicken and starts running.
  • Caeden Dunwald knows that he's heading into a trap because he's been through it four times already. For fun. When you do it with him, be sure to stay close to the guy, because he knows damn well what he's doing and the twilight ambushers will fall like flies around him. He's escorting you.

Platform Game

• Rocko's Modern Life: Spunky's Dangerous Day is an entire game built around the concept: You control Rocko who has to protect Spunky, who wanders mindlessly in whatever direction he's facing, from all types of hazards.
• Although it may be not be such a 'traditional' escort mission, each world in Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg starts with one of these. Sure, you may be actually (indirectly) controlling the Elder's egg, and it may not be so bad at first.......but just wait until you get to Blizzard Castle and onwards.
• Cave Story has a scene where your escort has a better weapon than you (unless you traded for it earlier, although this barely makes a difference), and is invulnerable. The AI, while a bit random, isn't too bad either. Then, in the Bonus Dungeon, you strap her to your back and she shoots anything in the opposite direction you're facing with one of the game's best weapons.
• In the Conker's Bad Fur Day mission "Saving Private Rodent", Rodent wears a completely impenetrable koopa shell-like suit, making him effectively immortal — he actually protects you, as you'd be killed by the carpet-bombing destroying the area and robotic mines that run at you without taking cover behind him.
• Crash Twinsanity includes two Doc Amok sequences, wherein Dr. Cortex is forced to run down a preset path (while being harassed by bees, their nest and a honey-hungry bear the first time around, and by Crash's evil duplicate in the second), while Crash must take another path whilst disabling the hazards on Cortex's route. The sequences were generally well accepted, thanks to its exhibition of the game's excellent Cortex-abuse-centric humour.
• Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble! introduces Parry the Parallel Bird, a bird which hovers parallel above you, picking up any items he touches. If he hits an enemy, he will die. You can clear the stage without him in all cases, but keeping him alive to the end of a couple levels is required for 100% Completion.
• Earthworm Jim:
  • The first game's stage "For Pete's Sake". You have to keep Peter Puppy from getting hurt on his walk through a ridiculously dangerous area by shooting at him to make him duck for cover and stop moving or whipping at him to make him bounce across pits. If Peter Puppy does get hurt, he turns into a giant monster, chews you up (dragging the two of you backward in the level for good measure), turns back, and then continues marching directly into danger, making for one of the hardest levels in the game. The happy-go-lucky skipping nature of his walk really sells it.
  • Earthworm Jim 2 has the "Puppy Love" sublevels, in which Psy-Crow throws Peter Puppy's children out of one house, and Jim must use a giant marshmallow to bounce them to Pete's house where he catches them with a funnel, until Psy-Crow adds a bomb into the mix, which causes Peter to freak out after catching it, pull it back out and throw it back at Psy-Crow to blow him up, which is repeated several times until he's defeated. Let 3 children splat onto the ground and Pete will become the aforementioned giant monster and turn Jim into his chew toy again.
• Fade To Black, a sequel to Flashback, has one segment where Conrad must escort an old man. He moves slowly and will stop when you are at a far enough distance and asks you to come back. Justified as he is an old man, and he makes sure to lampshade it too. You could shoot him, but then the alliance will just abandon you to your death.
• Flash Back has an escort mission in the second level. It's not so bad; the NPC simply walks forward slowly, so this feels more like a timed mission than anything else.
• Carrie's minigames in Kirby's Epic Yarn involve you carrying her to a certain spot within various levels while on a time limit. She can't die, but letting her fall down a pit or get hit by an enemy takes precious seconds off the clock. Bronto Burts also like to hang around and try to carry her off if given the chance, wasting even more of your time.
• The Mega Man Zero series has a few escort missions. Most of them don't allow the escortee to die, but you always lose rank points for any damage they take. The most infuriating is a desert rescue in the first Zero game — you have to make it across the desert, defeat a boss, and then bring an injured Reploid back (all the minor enemies having respawned in the meantime). If he takes more than one or two hits, kiss that S-rank goodbye. The only saving grace of this mission is that he's immune to Zero's own weapons, so you can stand "on top" of him swinging the saber and create a kind of force field. The injured ally CAN die if you become careless enough.
• New Super Mario Bros. Wii: Every once in a while, a Toad icon will appear at a level you have already beaten. If you retry that level without any other players, you get to try to escort a Toad retainer across the level for an extra 1-up or three and an extra mushroom house. Unfortunately, Toad starts as Super, so he dies in two hits, and is completely brain-dead, strolling back and forth where you leave him with no AI whatever. Plus, you have to carry him, rendering all level 2 powers (Fire, Ice, Propeller) useless except as an extra Hit Point. It's easier in levels with Yoshi, since you can have him carry Toad in his mouth and jump off to fight enemies. Still, it's a good thing the rewards are great for saving the boneheaded 'shroom.
• Psychonauts:
  • There is a very brief, very easy tutorial Escort Mission in the very first mental level of the game, "Coach Oleander's Basic Braining". It involves guiding your fellow campter Dogen through a minefield. It's complicated by the fact that Dogen will always walk right towards you in a straight line regardless of what's in-between, and that he frequently panics and has to be reassured to stop him from bolting and running over a mine.
  • The last level, "The Meat Circus" starts with a segment that's part Escort Mission and part Rise to the Challenge, as it requires Raz to protect Coach Oleander's inner child after their mindscapes accidentally merge, while navigating a tricky series of jumps and acrobatic features.
• rain (2013) has you, playing as a young boy, escorting a young girl through a rain-soaked alternate dimension, guiding her around obstacles and helping her escape from fiendish monsters. However, in practice, this is more of an aversion: The boy is just as trapped there as the girl and needs her help just as much as she needs his. Most puzzles can only be solved by the two working together.
• Shantae and the Pirate's Curse: The "Run Run Rottytops!" section has Shantae carrying a poisoned Rottytops through a forest while avoiding grabby hands, licky tongues, kiss-happy statues, and white projectile spitting phallic symbols. Unfortunately, since Shantae has her hands full with an injured Rottytops, she's unable to attack while doing this and one hit from an obstacle is enough to take them out. The difficulty of the section gets a lampshade later if you try to enter the forest again, with Shantae refusing with a "There's no way I'm going back in there".
• The Sonic 3 & Knuckles romhack The Challenges has a mission in which Knuckles has to get to the end of the level while making sure Tails never dies or gets left behind. What's nice is that Tails still can be controled by a second player. Another mission has you play as Tails instead, while the CPU as Sonic couldn't care less about escorting you (ironic, isn't it?). The objective is to keep up with Sonic until he reaches the end.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) has two stages where Sonic must escort Elise. As a twist, he's actually carrying her in his arms, which somehow makes it more difficult than if she were simply trailing behind. Sonic can only jump short distances, and his homing attack will more often than not send him flying straight into enemy fire. Elise does have the ability to create a temporary barrier around them, which allows him to deflect bullets and walk on water, but even that proves somewhat useless when you can barely defend yourself against hordes of angry robots.
• Spyro the Dragon:
  • In Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage!, one orb task has you escorting an alchemist to Hunter though a field full of indestructible rock monsters (the only thing you can do is delay them for a few seconds by ramming into them). The thing is, he seems to be blind, since he just charges stupidly ahead regardless of whether or not one of said monsters is right in front of him, and if he gets hit once, you have to start all over. It doesn't help that he has to stroll through the entire field despite the fact that Hunter is literally ten feet from where you start.
    • It gets worse if you kill the Earthshapers first, once you get the unlimited Superflame powerup: turns out he is programmed to take a route that makes him run into every single one of them. To rephrase: he makes you fight off every Earthshaper on purpose.
  • And if you don't have the Headbash skill yet (which you're supposed to acquire in a later level, meaning you most likely don't) you can't complete the mission that comes immediately afterwards. So if you want 100% completion, you have to come back... and do the escort mission AGAIN.
  • Spyro: Year of the Dragon has another — this time you play as Sheila and have to escort two haiku-spouting guys through a mushroom field so they can blow up a cage containing a dragon egg. That would be all well and good... except they make sure to take a path that has them run into all the mushrooms unless you stomp them into the ground first, and if they do, their bomb explodes before they reach their destination. Which begs the question of why they decided to light the bomb BEFORE they set off for the cage, rather than when they got there....
    • To make matters worse, you can't even run ahead and clear out the whole path, because the obstacles regenerate after a short period of time. The first time doing the mission, it seems easy because you can run ahead and destroyed everything, only to fail because the mushrooms popped back out of the ground.
• The fourth level of Stinkoman 20X6 gives you an escort mission where your escortee is actually supposed to be an idiot. This doesn't make it any less Nintendo Hard.
• Wild 9: In one stage, you have to escort one member who can only move when touched by light and will practically walk off the ledge if you don't set up a platform to catch her; it doesn't help matters that there is a giant steamroller chasing her.

Puzzle Game

• Bad Piggies has some screens where you need to carry the King Pig over the obstacle course, the problem being his great size and weight.
• Boom Blox has the Mitten Kittens levels near the end of adventure mode. In the first, you have to deal with shooting every enemy around them as they slowly walk towards a giant pumpkin. In the second? One walks slowly forward while a million grim reapers spawn. You have to defend them by putting blocks in the way. Blocks that the kitten will attack, no matter how out of the way they are.
• Stage eight of Catherine throws both Vincent, who you've been playing as, and his girlfriend Katherine into the puzzle, and it's a boss stage to boot. You've been doing this for eight nights straight now and know a whole slew of block techniques, so you're more than familiar with what to do, but this is a terrifying, confusing nightmare for Katherine, so you're tasked with leading her up the paths you make and calling for her to either move or stop in place to avoid the boss's attacks, making sure all the while to stay behind and wait for her, since she takes an extra second to climb a block.
• In Gruntz, the gruntz carrying Warpstone Pieces are this. They cannot defend themselves, they cannot pick up any tools, and if they die, you lose. And you have to bring them every time to the end of the level to win.
• * Nibblers: Some levels have you guide helpless fish into water. They are impervious to everything, so a potential run-in with danger is the least of your worries...
• Portal's world-famous Companion Cube is the star of an escort mission that can't actually be solved without it (or him. One of the side effects of Enrichment Center testing is believing inanimate objects to be alive, after all.) The Cube is even used as a bullet shield in some parts of the level, and can't actually be destroyed at all. Except in the incinerator at the end, into which the player is required to throw him.
  • Except we learn in Portal 2 that he wasn't really destroyed. Yay!

Real-Time Strategy

• Achron pulls this, rather annoyingly, in the seventh mission of the second campaign. Not only is your escort just as squishy as normal infantry, he actually heads his own army (as in runs a full 50 meters in front of it). To top it off, this AI is actually deliberately programmed to do every last one of these things.
• The Fleshstorm 2 mod for Battlezone II has a particularly brutal escort mission. The Recycler you are escorting is mostly competent, there aren't a whole lot of enemies, and you can order the Recycler and the other escorts around. The twist is that the planet's atmosphere is on fire and you're trying to escape before the hull of your tank melts and your dropship leaves you behind. You have a single repair truck and a pair of hover tanks to assist you, making the level a juggling act between repairing yourself, your Recycler and your (disposable) allies. If you forge too far ahead to kill enemy static defenses, you will die before you can reach the repair truck. If you don't forge ahead enough, your Recycler will be overwhelmed by enemy fire and be destroyed. If your craft is destroyed, you will die upon ejecting because a skintight spacesuit doesn't offer much protection against a flaming atmosphere.
• Command & Conquer: One GDI mission in the original game has the player not only facing off against a formidable Nod installation, but having to protect the eccentric Dr. Moebius from the enemy while doing so. This in itself wouldn't be so bad (the player can even control the good doctor and keep him out of harm's way), except the orders also extend to protecting the local civilian population in general - civilians whom Nod likes to attack for no adequately explained reason, and failing that, they have an inexplicable habit of wandering into nearby Tiberium fields and dying themselves.
  • Command and Conquer: Zero Hour, the GLA campaign starts with you having to escort a car which can only take 2 shots from anything more than an assault rifle, and that's on Easy mode. Every enemy also automatically targets the escort as a first priority over all of the other units in the area, INCLUDING artillery, which means that the escort can be killed by artillery platforms that the player cannot even see yet. Needless to say, players around the world hate this mission.
  • In Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars, while most of the escort vehicles—such as the MCV—are tough enough to survive, the bonus objectives for the Escort Missions include the words "unharmed." The worst are undoubtedly the Nod Australia missions.
• Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive has a mission which begins when the heroes (who are carrying the freshly captured Sanchez) have to cross a canyon in which they spot an ambush being set by El Diablo's men. The subversion is that the intended way to play this mission is to leave the prisoner in a safe spot and to slay each of the ambushers.
• In FTL: Faster Than Light, the Unidentified Cruiser unlock quest requires you to find a damaged stasis pod, deliver it to a random-event crew study event to revive the pod's occupant, then bring the occupant to a very specific sector so that they can activate a beacon to take you to a secret sector, where they must then be taken to a final Quest beacon to end the quest and unlock the cruiser.
• Iron Marines has a few of these. Some missions have the escortee controllable, where some other missions have the AI control them.
  • One early mission involves escorting an alien diplomat who moves very slowly as hordes of aliens attack you and her while a meteor shower rains down. She's capable of putting up Deflector Shields, and the game will helpfully warn you with a red flashing screen if she's in an area where a meteor will strike soon.
  • Ascendaar has a mission to escort a hacker to hack some Peripheroid terminals. She's of average speed, somewhat durable and will heal over time, thankfully, but enemies can and will attack from the front and back. The main trouble is that this mission is timed, which means you have to make sure you're constantly moving forwards if she's not hacking terminals.
  • One of Borealis' missions has you escort Ga'r King to a giant horn so he can blow it. Thankfully he's controllable, and Rank Scales with Asskicking is in full force here — not only is the king more durable than a mecha, he can eat a huge chunk of meat to restore a good amount of health, deals massive damage to grounded enemies with his battlehammer and throws big chunks of ice that are heavily damaging against Airborne Mooks. As long as he doesn't get swamped by enemies over a long time period, you should be fine.
  • White Fangs has you escort AI-controlled Fenrir and Fenrir Alphas. The good news is that they have slightly more health than their mook selves, the bad news is that Raad Portals will spawn in when they're trying to get to the exit... and being beasts and all, the Fenrir will happily charge into any spawned Raad and try to take them down while getting damaged by the Raad attacks. You can only afford to lose 7 Fenrir in this mission, too. Prevention is better than cure, and it's thus essential to take down the Raad Portals before they spawn any Raad at all.
  • The battle against Nexus. You have a turtle-like Spider Tank who moves slower than molasses, and the boss has several nasty attacks that will target it and deal great damage or even One-Hit Kill it. Your goal is to damage the boss enough so that he retreats into the portal, then move the Tortugon the portal to destroy it, and it must be done three times, each subsequent time gives the boss a slew of nastier attacks. While your Tortugon is quite durable, its slow speed will put it in the way of the boss' attacks, and if any of them are destroyed you fail the mission. The only good news is that you get a brand new Tortugon with full HP for each phase.
• MechCommander is all over the place with this one.
  • The first game is arguably the worst, featuring a level where you must escort a convoy of slow, unarmed, unarmored ambulances to an escape point that just drive in a straight line regardless of what's happening, being a horrific combination of Clueless Snail. While there's an explanation to the slow speed (the ambulances are carrying injured people, so they can't go cross-country at 90kph), their frustrating tendency to just line up and die does not help.
  • Then there's the mission where you must link up with and escort a Raven scout trapped behind enemy lines. This is much more tolerable because at least you can tell the Raven to run like the dickens.
  • Then there's the mission where you have to ensure that the last survivor of a bad combat drop escapes intact. Fortunately, he's in an Atlas, which means he's very tough. Unfortunately, he's in an Atlas, which also means he's very slow, and he has a bad habit of rushing at every available enemy in the name of avenging his company.
  • The sequel was not nearly so obnoxious, thankfully, with very few out and out NPC units that you had to escort; most either accomplished the objective and then retreated, or had the good sense to not stick their heads up when 60-ton Humongous Mecha are stomping about.
• Pikmin 3: The Formidable Oak has you go up to the top, have Pikmin carry Olimar, and then guide him along a different route back to base while fighting enemies and solving puzzles. While this is happening, a Mama Bear Eldritch Abomination known as the Plasm Wraith stalks Olimar in an attempt to reclaim him. Once you get back to base, the Plasm Wraith goes One-Winged Angel and absorbs Olimar to initiate the Final Boss fight.
• SOS is a game with a goal of escorting as many people from a drowning ship as possible, hoping they don't die along the way.
• An early mission of Starcraft II tasks you with defending APCs filled with colonists from Zerg. Given the setting, they're reasonably resilient but not altogether well-armed: they'll barely survive an assault by a handful of Zerg units and go down in seconds against heavy opposition. The destruction of an APC forces the individual colonists out, meaning you would then have to escort them. Fortunately for you, there's a minimum number of evacuees required to win (as opposed to all), so you can lose some and still win. Naturally however, there's an achievement for no loses.
  • Later in the game (in the mission "Engine of Destruction"), Tychus Findlay is in control of the Odin, a Super Prototype Humongous Mecha of incredible power. Unfortunately, he doesn't notice that his communication device is stuck on "transmit", which means he can't get any commands from Raynor (IE the player). After a short period of bafflement, he decides to just "have some fun" and charge on a maniacal rampage through the Dominion's super-high security weapon testing facility. The Odin is, admittedly, ridiculously strong, but it will be overwhelmed by enemy forces if you don't give it proper support. That's the bad news, but there's a lot of good news that make this mission not just bearable, but actually pretty fun:
    • The Odin has over 5,000 HP (more than any of the buildings in your base, by far);
    • You can repair the mecha, and the enemy usually doesn't target your SCVs and science vessels in combat;
    • The Odin moves slow enough that your forces—most importantly, your SCVs and science vessels that are repairing it—can easily keep up, but not so slow as to be frustrating;
    • He pauses between bases so you have time to prepare for the next one; and
    • The Odin's offensive capabilities are absolutely massive, and can easily crush most ground forces sent against it, especially on lower difficulties. In fact, on the lowest difficulty grade, you don't actually need an army to make it - just send a few SCVs and/or science vessels along and watch the Odin hurt people and break stuff. The next one up only requires you send a few anti-air units to reinforce the Odin. And even if you don't have Goliaths or Vikings to provide anti-air, the game is kind enough to give you Wraiths, which have at least decent anti-air capability.
  • Co-op gives us Mist Opportunities, where you have to defend a number of harvesting bots from enemy attacks. This one becomes especially annoying because the mission giver will blare in your ears about his bots being destroyed when even a single zergling scratches the paintjob. Factor in that he will send out multiple bots over several locations, and you have to also manage your base and production, and the optional bonus objectives, and it quickly turns into chaos. While the bots themselves have decent amounts of hitpoints and a shield that they automatically pop, if you ignore them thinking they'll outlast a few nuisance enemies, things can quickly spiral out of control as more enemy waves appear that can rapidly end your run.
• StarCraft:
  • There's a brief "escort" segment of an early Terran mission, where you have to get through explored territory with a limited number of military units, SCVs, and a unique unit that might result in failure if he dies. On the other hand, it is done in the first thirty seconds.
  • There is also an escort mission for the Zerg campaign, in which you are equipped with Hydralisks with twice the HP and attack power of normal Hydralisks and a bunch of Zerglings. You are fully in control of the escortee, who can cloak and OHKO most of the units on that map. Also, this being a Zerg campaign, your entire force also regenerates health over time. Talk about overpowering.
  • Earlier on, there is another escort mission for the Zerg campaign, with the escortee being a mere Drone holding an egg. Of course, it was an early mission, which means both your forces and the enemy Protoss blocking the way only have access to basic tech. Combined with the fact that there are few enemies actually guarding the destination, the mission can be done in under ten minutes.
  • The expansion, Brood War also had an escort mission during the Terran campaign. The player had to escort a group of unarmed pilots to steal a fleet of battlecruisers. Fortunately, the player is given full control of the pilots and can just keep them in the rear, and since this is an early mission, it has a relatively easy difficulty. Plus, if you're inept enough to actually lose any pilots, your commander will just simply chastise you and send replacements.
• Supreme Commander: One early mission, in a game with mechs, giant heavy tanks and strategic bombers, you are tasked with escorting a guy in a truck. He will last as long as you think a truck would last against cruise missiles and long range artillery.
• Syndicate: One of the hardest missions of the original game involves escorting an NPC between two buildings in a city. Said NPC quite happily wanders out in his own time, completely oblivious to your Badass Longcoat-wearing, cybernetically enhanced, mini-gun wielding agents having a battle with similarly equipped enemy agents.
• In Warcraft III:
  • There are some escort missions, but the caravans you escort come with a few of their own defenders. The first time you escort some Tauren, who who have some pretty tough troops, and the other you help some Blood Elves, who can protect their own caravan as well as heal your units and themselves.
  • The expansion also features the reverse in the undead campaign, you need to stop human caravans from escaping into the mountains at various key positions.
  • The Hour of Twilight instance offers a surprisingly painless version in World of Warcraft. Thrall moves just slow enough that the party can stay ahead without waiting excessively, and he's tough enough that you don't really need to pay attention to his health.
  • A lot of the later "escort" quests have the NPC actively follow you rather than moving on a "rail" at a predetermined pace. This solves many of the problems of Escort Missions in general (especially poor pacing), but you still have to keep an eye on the NPC in case he/she/it decides to go after nearby mobs, and/or vice versa.
  • One World of Warcraft quest plays it straight and inverts it at the same time, where you have to escort Harrison Jones out of a troll ruin, at the end of which the objective is complete: "Harrison Jones has escorted you to safety."
• Warcraft III has you as Thrall's orcs escort a Tauren caravan trough a plain with some oases on the way, while you're attacked by centaur. The expansion has a Night Elf mission where a Blood Elf caravan has to be escorted while attacked by undead and looking for hidden caches of supplies. This one is more elaborate, featuring a crossroads, mercenaries, and a caravan leader (Kael'thas) who actually fights with you.

Roguelike

• One optional early-game quest in Ancient Domains of Mystery is to find the cute puppy and bring it back to the little girl in Terinyo. Naturally, the puppy has managed to find its way to the bottom of nearly the most difficult dungeon in the area, and it's all too willing to get into fights with monster along the way back in spite of being fairly fragile. Also, the puppy dies automatically after a few days of in-game time if you don't find it before. Frankly, after making it through the earlier parts of the crazy Luck-Based Mission to find it alive (which probably means you had skill too), the escorting is the easier part.
• Crypt of the NecroDancer's Amplified DLC introduces Mary, a character whose gimmick is that she's being followed by a lamb at all times. If that lamb dies, she does too.
• The Roguelike Elona grants the ability to the player to do various escort quests, which are also Timed Missions. Most of the time this is no problem, as most escortees are solid enough to survive while you kill the various random encounters that appear on the world map, and sometimes even help you do so.
• Pokémon Mystery Dungeon:
  • The escort missions in the series tend to be a source of much frustration, as they require you escort an extremely dumb and often weak Pokemon who among other things, can be easily KO'd by enemy Pokemon, doesn't know how to avoid traps and dangerous terrain, wanders off if it gets so much as one space away from your party in a hallway, can't be issued orders (Keeping you from telling them to stay put if the previous happens), use non-offensive moves with every step (Which frequently causes them to get separated), and picks fights with anything they come across. If they get KO'd, then it's counted as a loss for you, and while having Reviver Seeds on hand will save them, you'll likely end up burning through so many (Especially in dungeons with Pokemon who possess long-range or full room attacks to snipe the escort) that the mission's rewards won't cover the expenses.
  • Ultimately in many cases, the best way to do these is to position the team in a long hallway with only two access points, putting controllable team members on either side of the escort and ordering them to stay, and then having the leader go solo to find the stairs. Some dungeons have dead ends — this makes it far easier as it now only takes one guard to protect the escortee while two team members can go through the dungeon.
  • The mandatory escort mission with Gengar in Rescue Team is especially painful, as he can walk through walls, and needs to be escorted through a dungeon with Pokemon who can do the same. Problem is, if you're incapable of moving through walls as well, you won't be able to aid him in fighting any Pokemon that attack him from within the walls, which will likely ensure his demise.
  • Explorers has an even worse mandatory escort in Cresselia. While she's not a total pushover, she's still dumb as dirt and you have to fight one of the most difficult bosses in the game with her in tow, where she'll likely end up burning through your precious Reviver Seeds as a result of one of her IQ skills making her take hits for adjacent low HP allies.
  • Mercifully, Gates To Infinity ended up averting it by removing escort missions entirely, and while you are still forced to bring Pokemon along with you at times, you no longer lose if they're KO'd, they take orders just like a standard team member, and are a lot less stupid overall.
• World of Horror has one as the boss of "Bizzare Bruit of the Blood-Curdling Botanist". Shiro-San, your escortee, does nothing, and the boss only attacks him. You don't lose the game if he dies, but you do get a bad ending for the mystery. You have the option of forcing the boss to attack you. If you finish the optional steps, you can also take a closer look at Shiro-San... which reveals he's being controlled by the Cordyceps Fungus and is the actual villain of the mystery. You must then kill him. If you have the Fire Axe from "Macabre Memoir of the Morbid Mermaids", you can Take a Third Option and hack your way free, then kill him decisively with a DIY Flamethrower.

Role-Playing Game

• The three students escorted in Avencast: Rise of the Mage try to help in combat, but since they're all low-level melee fighters they're most likely to pick fights they can't win or get killed by friendly fire. You can cheat by locking them in their room and backtracking to clear the monsters that respawned behind you.
• During the Honey Factory lockdown in Bug Fables, the Overseer gets trapped in a honey storage room. You have to escort her past swarms of Abomihoneys, and if they touch her you have to start all over again. Thankfully, Leif's Bubble Shield completely protects her, making it a lot easier than most examples of this trope.
• All of CIMA: The Enemy is an Escort Mission, with the player having to escort about a dozen settlers through various dungeons while keeping them safe from monsters (the game ends if even one of them dies.) Fortunately, only a couple of them are completely useless while the rest are able to serve some purpose, from being able to fight back and defend themselves and others, to solving puzzles, to healing, to causing monsters to Fail A Spot Check and not notice nearby settlers.
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a special pre-order mission from Tong Si Hung halfway through the game where you must rescue Tong's son from mercenaries. When you find him, you think it'll play as an escort segment, since Adam even tells Tong Jr. to stay close to him. However, the mysterious device Tong tells Adam to give his son at the beginning of the mission is actually a handheld cloaking device and Tong Jr. uses that to escape on his own instead, as planned.
• Dragon's Dogma has several escort requests that function as dates of a sort (makes sense when they ask you to take them someplace nice, like a healing spring, less so when it's an ancient, overrun fortress). The escortee's AI is programmed to stay as close to you as possible, which makes sense... until you run into enemies and they're still sticking close to you, even as you climb up a cyclops and they run around under its feet and get squished. It's best to know where they'll ask to go, get the lay of the land and where large monsters like to ambush you, and then kill said large monsters and take the person on their escort mission before they respawn three days later.
• EarthBound (1994): Just as the plot begins, Ness must escort his neighbors and an alien home. The alien, however, is exponentially stronger than then-level-1 Ness, and in fact does most of the fighting for you during the mission. He renders the 3 humans temporarily immune to PSI attacks as well, so you're invincible against the mini-boss, too.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Daggerfall escort missions are very controllable due to the limitations of the game engine - your escortee's portrait appears in the upper corner of your screen and goes wherever your character goes until the quest time limit is up. The only way for the escortee to die is to die yourself.
  • Morrowind:
    • Every escortee is a Leeroy Jenkins due to their AI. You'll be very thankful when you can tell them to "wait here" while you clear the path ahead, but for several escort missions, that isn't an option.
    • That withered old pilgrim who begs you to escort her to a local shrine? She won't hesitate for a second to charge that Atronach made of fire with her fists swinging. She also moves painfully slowly, and won't hesitate to rush into battle despite being equipped with nothing more than fancy clothes, no armour or weapons. The journal updates as you progress through the quest make note of how irritating she is, and the quest is even called The Annoying Pilgrim. The game actively wants you to defy this trope, because she only gives 100 gold as a reward upon reaching your destination, but you can loot 500 if you "accidentally" let her die, meaning that you don't have much incentive to protect her.
    • Further complicating matters is that most escortees are extremely slow. They often run slower than you walk. Perhaps the most frustrating one is the escaped Argonian slave in the middle of nowhere. Not only is he in the middle of nowhere, he is really slow, and to make matters worse, you can't use transportation like teleportation, ships, or stilstriders with him. You literally have to walk him several in-game hours to the place he needs to be in order to complete the quest.
    • In an early Mages Guild quest, you're likely better off standing back and letting your escortee do all the fighting - he's a wizard of modest power who starts blasting away at any baddies he sees, is more than capable of killing most threats, and doesn't care if you're in the way.
  • Oblivion:
    • Oblivion features some quests that, upon conclusion, give you the option to escort a (usually defenseless) NPC out of a dungeon. It also usually gives you the option to tell the poor sap to find their own way out.
    • A few of the Oblivion escortees are invulnerable plot-important NPCs and can be used as impromptu companions/party members by enterprising players. Most notable is Martin Septim, who you can go adventuring with throughout Cyrodil for months before finally bringing him back to become Emperor. Unfortunately, his invincibility runs out near the end of the game, when he decides to participate in a huge battle. If he dies, you fail.
    • The Knights of the Thorn mission involves escorting a Leeroy Jenkings/Miles Gloriosus hybrid "knight" and his buddies through an Oblivion Gate. Thankfully, you can still complete the mission without too significant of a penalty if he dies, but if you want to keep him alive, get ready for some serious frustration. A major problem is that the inside of the tower you go through is one room with 3 levels. However, the companions don't know that and only know that there's a Scamp on the 3rd floor and by the Nine they're gonna kill it. So they charge through the entire building and usually run into stronger enemies in the hallways. It's a shame that one of the few times the game's pathfinding is good ends up screwing you... An alternative is to run across the lava to avoid the suicidal morons and just finish the mission solo. Sure, the lava will hurt you, but it's preferable to escorting them. Seriously.
    • Most people you escort/follow have the horrendous trait of moving faster than your walking speed but slower than your running speed, so you're constantly dancing around them either catching up or waiting for them to catch up. The worst part comes when you get too far ahead, and they stop and yell for you to catch up with them, despite you being closer to their destination than they are.
    • Oblivion contains several rescue missions, but only two where the NPC cannot be told to hang back. And in one of those two, you can simply ignore the NPC until you clear the place out. A large majority of these missions are Fighters Guild for some reason.
    • However, perhaps the most famous escort mission of any Elder Scrolls game occurs when the Fighters' Guild sends you to help someone get somewhere and you fail. What starts as a simple escort mission turns into a no-time-limit political conspiracy minor story that can net the player a constant flow of resources until completed.
    • Lampshaded in a Mage's Guild mission where you meet someone who tells you to follow him and then charges straight into a deadly trap. You don't fail the mission, it's just there for color. (Red, mostly.)
    • The first Oblivion gate you go in has you meet an NPC who comes with you. You don't have to protect him at all, but he'll put up a good fight. Also, should you want to do the Dark Brotherhood quests, he's a good target for an "accidental" fireball...
    • There is also of course the final mission of the main quest, in which you have to escort Martin Septim (and some guards if you can) through hordes of invading Daedra to the temple of the one so he can light the Dragonfires and defeat Mehrunes Dagon. Unfortunately, it's very easy to hit your allies when trying to hit an enemy, and it's also very hard to heal your allies without healing the enemies near them.
  • Skyrim:
    • There is one as part of a quest in the village of Dawnstar. Unlike most people you travel with, he will walk at a deliberate and slow pace, will require you to stay with him or he won't continue, and he likes to stop and talk a lot. However, you need him to open a few doors and dispel a magical barrier protecting a quest-related artifact. Thankfully, he's invulnerable and can handle himself in a fight, but the pathfinding can glitch.
    • The other problem with this and some of the earlier escort missions is that Friendly Fire is in play and the escortee will turn on you. Erandur's quest is particularly susceptible to this with the tight corridors. Thankfully, later escorts (such as Serana in Dawnguard) are much more tolerant of accidental attacks.
• Fable toys around with this; escort missions are a mandatory part of your Guild Quests, but there's also a steady stream of traveling merchants you can assist in crossing a specific part of Albion for some quick cash (which has no impact on the storyline whatsoever). Also, there are mercenaries you can find later on in the game that you can hire to escort you, to a degree. However, for these latter two examples, there is greater reward in killing them off than to complete the escort; that same path the merchants need to get through houses a demon temple that, if you sacrifice your charges there at a specific time, grants you mucho evil points and some of the best bows in the game. If they're on too low health they won't pay you at the end, if this happens, kill the ungrateful bastards.
• In Final Fantasy III, the Escorts in the NES version don't even participate in battle. And only Sara, Elia and Cid are really escorted - Desch doesn't even know what he's doing until his last dungeon, and Unne is just telling you where to go.
• At several points in Final Fantasy III, you have to escort NPCs who thankfully can't be targeted by enemies. In the DS version, they can even pop into battle and cast a spell now and again.
• Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings has a large number of them, with a fair number of AI types. The developers seem to have known how much gamers hate these missions, the ones with suicidal allies have weak enemies.
• Various Fire Emblem missions are based around protecting key units. Most of the time, you can have one of your more-armored party members go over and "rescue" them — removing the protected unit from the map as long as their carrier survives.
  • Chapter Three of Radiant Dawn forces you to keep two civilians protected, but one of these civilians has much higher HP and defense than anyone on your team at that point. Even though he's unarmed, he's nearly immortal. The only complication preventing you from using him as a meatshield is that the second escortee is not nearly so durable and you cannot separate them without crippling your limited offensive options. On Easy mode you can even let them die with no penalty but the loss of bonus EXP.
  • Sometimes (especially in the GBA games) the NPC you're supposed to protect is in a well fortified location, or is so insanely overpowered that they can rout the entire map (or at least as many enemies as their weapon durability will allow) by themselves. The challenge is not in protecting the NPC from the enemies, but in protecting the hordes of enemies from the NPC long enough to get EXP for your own units!
  • In most Battalion Wars missions, you have to capture some enemy point. This requires you to have at least one infantry unit alive. Since you can command said units — Attack mode, Sentry Mode, and Follow — this is a lot easier than it sounds.
• Subverted in Steven Universe fangame Flawed Crystals. During your first run through the Barn, Ronaldo will insist on following you, even though the fields are crawling with monsters. He appears on the battle map, potentially leading the player to believe they need to protect him... but in fact he is untargetable by the enemies, so you don't have to worry.
• Gothic provides an option for an inverse escort mission on two occasions. In the Old Camp there are two recruiters for the New Camp and Brotherhood respectively, who will happily escort you to their place. The paths there are rather infested with wild animals who can easily shred your unprotected self (since you can only get better armor as the plot advances), but the escorts are powerful enough that they can't be hurt and can kill anything they meet. Even better, you gain the experience from their kills (and can loot the bodies), so it's actually in your best interest to have them kill off everything in your way, or near it. Thus, on no less than two glorious occasions, it's finally your turn to be the reckless escorted who keeps wandering off the path, draw aggro from avoidable hostiles, and have to be saved all the time.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords: The Sith Lords has an optional escort mission on Telos. A Twi'lek asks you to lead him out of a droid-infested military base. Fortunately, at the point you meet him, all droids behind you should be dead already, and even if they aren't, they seem to have no interest in the guy. The problem? Because of the poor AI, you have to be very lucky to stand in the right spot so then he realizes he should start moving and follow you. But there might be crates in his way, and sometimes he runs in the opposite direction entirely. Frankly, you can just kill him and loot his body, or leave him be, all this mission is worth is a few light side points.
• Luminous Plume: While fighting alongside Valerie in the Mystic Forest and Northern Plains, the player has to keep her from dying or they'll have to restart the round. Fortunately, she's capable of fighting, so she not too hard to protect on Normal or lower.
• Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga has you escorting Princess Peach through Teehee Valley to Little Fungitown. You have to keep her onscreen at all times, make sure there are no enemies heading towards her, and work quickly to open the gate at each section of the valley. If you don't do one of the first two, she gets kidnapped. You must rescue her and try again (the gates reset themselves, making this even more annoying), because the next boss fight won't start if you go through the valley yourself.
• During the Citadel DLC for Mass Effect 3, you take one squadmate in addition to newcomer Maya Brooks to a casino charity event, where Maya will keep out of sight and hack her way into a secure location while you and your other partner provide distractions to security. This wouldn't ordinarily be annoying, as nobody is ever in any real danger, but Maya often reminds you to Continue Your Mission, Dammit! while you're trying to disable any given piece of tech, or hear all of the hilarious background dialogue.
• Monster Hunter: World both lampshades and subverts the typical Escort Mission. The quest is titled "The Best Kind of Quest" and is about leading a group of researchers through the Wildspire Wastes; while they move slowly (normal walking pace), they can't actually be harmed or even attacked by any of the monsters. The mission is effectively the same as any number of quests in the game where the player goes to designated points on the map before a scripted monster attack occurs. You can even wander away from the researchers and explore (or fight the Rathian that shows up) with no greater penalty than having to hear the Handler say "Let's see what kind of present Zorah Magdaros has left for us!" about fifty times.
• The Original Campaign from Neverwinter Nights 1 had several types of escort mission. Some were straight escorts where the NPC would follow you until close to safety and then would leave automatically (giving you experience points). Others were averted in that once rescued, the NPC would leave to make their own way "home" (you still got XP). Interestingly, the NPCs you needed to escort were always at least reasonably good fighters and although they could die, they had enough health to survive long enough for you to rescue them.
• Neverwinter Nights 2:
  • Defanged unconvincingly when the main quest requires that you escort an NPC, said NPC will gleefully engage any enemies in combat, quite beyond your control. However, they can't actually die (or "fall unconscious," as it is); some even have an infinite supply of healing potions. It's a testament to just how annoying the Escort Mission is that you won't care that this is unrealistic.
  • The quest My sister, the rebel proves the exception to the exception, as Lisbet can and indeed does die if you're not careful. And she stays dead, too. Although in this case it's mitigated somewhat by the fact that you actually can order her to stay put while you clear out each room.
  • Also averted with the quest to protect Lord Tavorick, who can be killed by demons storming his estate. However, his portrait is in the party roster at all times, so you can see when he needs healing, and his death doesn't actually fail the quest, as he'll reveal — either with his dying words or when you escort him to safety — that he already passed the MacGuffin elsewhere, but you get additional XP for saving him.
• When you are asked to escort the new Waterdhavian ambassador to Neverwinter in Neverwinter Nights 2, it turns out that your task is to break him out of the orcish prison in which he is held, after which he insists he can make it on his own.
• In Paper Mario: Sticker Star, a part of Hither Thither Hill has you come across a green Toad crying in the corner. He needs Mario's help to get back to town, and follows behind him temporarily. However, if an enemy approaches the Toad, he screams and runs back to his original spot, so Mario has to defeat enemies along the way. When the Toad makes it to town, he thanks Mario by telling him a secret code.
• In Phantom Dust, a female NPC is literally suicidal; wanting to die and be punished is her MO, and in addition to running head first into a team of enemies, she'll use attacks that use her very finite health bar as fuel. There are multiple team missions in the game, but most don't require your partner to survive, and they can be revived if they fall. Many of the game's true escort missions, where you lose if your partner dies, involves said female character.
• Pokémon:
  • In Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, there are a few missions where you escort a fellow trainer. These trainers heal your and their Pokémon after every battle, are moderately helpful in battle (in particular, you keep getting attacked by two opposing trainers at once, and having an ally makes it closer to fair), and don't pass out and cause a Game Over when their Pokémon faint. Completing one of these missions nets you the ability to partner up with the trainer again in the Battle Tower. More than that, by the end of the mission, you'll sometimes receive a rather good reward. The only reason they could possibly irk you is if you're trying to catch 'em all; not only do wild Pokémon start coming in twos (and you can't catch one Pokemon unless you faint the other), but Cheryl's Chansey doesn't know the meaning of the phrase "please stop using Egg Bomb so I can capture this thing alive". Of course, you can just knock your partner's Pokémon out yourself.
  • This also happens three times in Pokémon Black 2 and White 2. First, you escort Hugh in the Castella City Sewers. Later, you escort Bianca in Reversal Mountain. Finally, after you complete the main storyline, you escort Cheren in Pinwheel Forest. In each case, unlike Diamond and Pearl, each partner has more than one Pokémon. Otherwise, it's the same as before.
  • In the original Pokémon Ranger, you are forced to lead a mechanic. And he's scared of bugs. Every time he sees one, he runs to the beginning of the mission. But... you have to guide him through a dense jungle! Well, if you're scared of Caterpie and the like, can't you just stay outside the jungle and I'll go and bring the part to you! And when you get to the part, he pisses off a Gyarados (of all things!). What makes this mission even worse is that Bug types will target you incessantly. There is nothing more infuriating than getting the mechanic to the other side of an area only for an Ariados to tackle him and send him scurrying back to the start.
• Resonance of Fate has you escorting an idol of Reanbell/Leanne on a floating platform through an "Open-Air Studio" containing possessed wooden dolls equipped with everything from flamethrowers to bazookas to a giant woodchipper. The idol is uncontrollable, goes on a preset path no matter what danger is in its way, can be damaged by enemies or even accidentally by your party while you initiate a heroic action, and cannot be healed unless you happen to have 50,000 Rubies. Good luck. However, you can stop the idol by placing one of your party members in its path, making this level much more tolerable. This scenario makes a return as a stage in Project × Zone, though it's made much easier (the statue is invincible and its movement is abstracted as a turn limit with the objective at the end of the tracks). The best part, however, is Zephyr's reaction, which is a more wordy but extremely pained version of "Oh no, not this again."
• Sacred:
  • Sacred: Underworld: Escortees tend to cause nervous breakdowns to the player, often by running into the most dangerous enemy and attacking him at the sacrifice of their own life. This counts for all kinds of escortees, to the point that you can see a maid merrily going to punch a orc warrior.
  • Early on, you find yourself wandering around with a soldier named Wilbur who is slated to die at a specific point in the plot. To ensure this happens, the game renders him immortal — the worst that can happen to him is that he'll get knocked out for about a minute. The problem is, a lot of side-quests require you to escort people who are about as durable as toilet paper, and have a bad habit of running right up to demons and skeletons and just standing there as if to say "Take my picture". (The worst ones will actually run up to the nearest enemy and start punching them.) Often, the only way to safely escort one of these morons is to know ahead of time that they need escorting, thoroughly clean the area in their path, THEN talk to them.
• Shadowrun Returns has a few missions where you are saddled with an NPC that must survive. In most cases, however, you gain control of said NPC as a Guest-Star Party Member and can direct them away from the action, and because the AI isn't programmed to target the escortee specifically unless it becomes the juiciest target on display they safety is usually guaranteed outside a Total Party Kill. The most memorable example of this trope in the series is probably an inversion, however: The AG Chemie Europa run in Dragonfall sees you escorting the MKVI prototype out of the building to your extraction point, and to say that it's not defenceless would be an understatement and then some. Losing the combined rest of the party is probably easier than losing the MKVI.
• In Shin Megami Tensei IV, some Challenge Quests task you with escorting an NPC to a destination. However, while escorting said NPC, you can't perform actions besides running or passing your turn to one of your demons, and the NPC can take damage from enemies; if they take too much damage, they'll retreat and you'll have to restart the Quest.
• Solasta: Crown of the Magister: Several quests saddle you with an NPC companion, getting a game over if they die. Thankfully all of them are totally under the player's control in combat and most of them are able to hold their own in a fight, meaning that they're not typically any harder to keep alive than your normal party members. The few who are actually defenseless can easily be told to run away from the enemies and hide behind cover to keep them safe, or made to hang back while the party explores so that they're too far away to be targeted by enemies at all.
• In the first Super Robot Wars: Original Generation game, there's a mission where Katina Tarask is an NPC and insists on charging straight towards every enemy that comes her way, even ignoring her captain's orders to retreat. She dies in a few hits, and if she does, it's an instant game over. The challenge of the mission is not so much defeating the enemies (which are still fairly weak) as it is making sure she doesn't get herself killed. Fortunately, she is called out on this immediately after the end of the mission.
• A few missions in Super Robot Wars L have Kouichi Hayase go berserk and charge right into the enemy army and multiple bosses. If his Linebarrel mech hasn't been upgraded enough, or Kouich is under-leveled, these missions can be very frustrating.
• The mission Rescuing Sarn Kamina in the single-player campaign of Telepath Tactics. She's not too fragile, and you are actually allowed to control her directly, but she's still pretty underleveled relative to your army and her opponents, so you'll want to keep her away from the action. The real difficulty comes if you try to rescue her husband, who is on the other end of the map and will be quickly overwhelmed if you can't run over to him immediately; fortunately, he's an Optional Party Member.
• A recurring objective in the Ys series.
  • In Ys: Ancient Ys Vanished ~ Omen Adol escorts Feena after rescuing her from a cell in the Solomon Temple.
  • In Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished – The Final Chapter you escort Tarf.
  • In Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim, you have to escort both Olha and Terra while escaping from the Romun ship.
  • In Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana Adol escorts sister Nia during her sudequest. Unlike other examples, you're not escaping, but rather visiting the mountain so she can pray here. She also will heal Adol and herself, if there are no monsters nearby.

Scrolling Shooter

• Dariusburst: Chronicle Saviours has "Defender" missions, where you have to guard a few supply ships offscreen and shoot down swarms of enemies before they get past you. If a lot of them manage to slip past you, it's Game Over.
• The original version of Jets'n'Guns plays this straight with the player having to tow an unarmed super fighter out of a heavily defended weapons laboratory without letting it get destroyed by the facility's defence systems or obstacles. The Gold Edition. however, plays with this trope quite a bit. One stage has you escorting a fleet of vessels that are actually part of the background elements and are invincible, but another stage has you towing a massive beer tank through enemy forces. The Escort Mission from the original is still present as well.

Shoot 'em Up

• Cannon Fodder has Escort Missions where you have to release and escort civilian prisoners. They're invulnerable, but the problem is that some of them are so pissed off that they'll attack your soldiers.

Simulation Game

• In F/A-18's escort missions, the pilots of the planes you have to protect are about as dumb as posts.
• The eleventh mission of Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies is simply titled "Escort". You must protect two passenger planes transporting some of the engineers responsible for Stonehenge and their families as they defect to your side while enemy planes try to shoot them down. Problem is, one of them is experiencing "technical difficulties" and must stay at a low altitude to maintain cabin pressure, and it never seems to occur to the pilots of the other passenger plane to lower their own altitude, so naturally you will have to keep flying back and forth to combat enemy fighters on two fronts instead of one. While this may prove tedious to some, as long as you're good at the game then you shouldn't have much trouble with it. In fact, the pilots of the passenger planes are amazed at how well you're doing considering the situation, reminding you of just how awesome you are and mitigating a good portion of the annoyance factor in the process.
• Air Force Delta Strike has you escorting various things from VIP aircraft chased by air battleships, to trains under attack by armed trains, to a Humongous Mecha artillery cannon. None of them can take much punishment.
• The final level of Aquanox was an escort mission in which all of the enemies use stun weapons. You could spend upwards of 30 minutes waiting for the transports to leave without realizing that they were already disabled and you had failed.
• Armored Core tend to have the people be escorted in rather flimsy mechs or even flimsier tanks or APCs. This is made easier by the fact that most escorts take a few seconds to get started on the field after you, with the easiest ones taking up to a full minute. Enemies also rarely spawn in Armored Core — the field is what you've got to deal with, and nothing ever sneaks up on the back of the escort. As such, a fast mech can tear ass ahead and start gutting the oncoming waves far ahead of the escort without any real concern for the escort. It still can't ever take a hit though.
• In Civilization Revolution, Spies, Settlers, and Great People can be easily captured and used for a rival's benefit if left undefended. Suffice it to say that they might not appear where you want them, and have to be moved if you want to put them to better use.
• Great Leaders in Civilization III require constant protection to move them from the scene of the battle which created them to a friendly city where they can actually do something useful. Good luck if the battle took place deep in enemy territory! Later games thankfully have Great People (even Great Generals) spawn from your cities, so they should be safe from combat unless things are going very badly for you.
• In helicopter sim Comanche 4, you had a helicopter that would insist on flying high and in a straight line, a perfect target for ground missiles.
• In Freelancer, at least two missions are openly presented as Escort Missions, and your unarmed sidekicks always manage to get caught in your fights, usually against entire wings of fighters. Fortunately, the AI is competent enough to let them have a chance.
• Freespace: any point at which you have to escort freighters and transports. They are lightly armored, and possess very few weapons, but are often mission-critical targets that absolutely cannot be allowed to die. You also have to escort warships fairly often, but this isn't nearly as annoying, because after all they're warships, and have plenty of point defense weapons to help out.
• Kerbal Space Program has "ferrying" missions where you must transport tourists somewhere and return them to Kerbin safely. This isn't too bad, since you can design your own space tourbus and they can't leave their seats; the one catch is that if G-force limits are enabled, they can pass out (temporarily) from any sudden acceleration. If this happens, you fail the mission and can't retry it (without Save Scumming)... and it's most likely to occur during reentry or parachute deployment, i.e. the very end of the flight.
• MechWarrior:
  • MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries features a few escort missions which typically involve tanks, which would be easy enough in any other game without 100 ton behemoth war machines of destruction. These tanks are SO weak, you and your allies can actually accidentally kill them by simply stepping on them! It typically only takes the enemy mechs one well placed shot to kill, and in most of the escort missions losing even ONE tank is a fail.
  • In two missions an objective is to make sure a certain mech doesn't die. Thankfully, these are Heavily armored assault mechs in both cases, so the only time this would happen is if you just simply did nothing.
  • The Mechworks defense is no cakewalk, while the Davion is willing to put the guns to bear on their Templar, you are stuck defending the Fafnir from possible attack. Against what is several assault lances gunning for you and just straying too far from your team is asking to be killed.
  • In the third game, you have to defend your Mobile Field Base vehicles for 17 out of 20 missions in the game, which are reasonably armored, get repaired after each mission, and most missions don't require you to move them as they're reasonably safe in the starting area of a mission.
  • For MechWarrior 2's Wolf campaign, you had to escort a dude in a hoverlimo to the opera. Through a war zone. Believe it or not, this half-made sense in the game, as the Clans tend to limit fire only to actual battles and deliberately avoid places of art. And the mission briefing hung a lampshade on it, with the final line being, "[Character] loves the opera." So much that he would apparently go in a tiny unarmed and fragile vehicle through a war zone escorted by a single Mech. It also had an escort mission where you had to guide a prototype Tarantula mech to waiting dropships.
• Naval Ops: Warship Gunner has a balance related one. Ships you have to escort are resilient at first, until you beat the game and get to what is essentially the game's "second quest". You still have all your fancy warships, and now enemies are upgraded with better weapons, equipment and hit points, but now this tends to kill your charges with one or two hits, because no one bothered to compensate these ships against the enemy's new lasers and lightning guns.
• Robotech: Battlecry has you escorting a "Cat's Eye" airborne radar craft which is under constant assault from spawning fighters from all directions. It flies straight and level the whole time, taking no evasive action whatsoever.
  • Then again, it can't possibly outmaneuever a fighter anyway, so its pilot probably figured that straight and level flight at least meant you, the defender, would know where it is. It's not a combat aircraft — based on the real-life E-2 and E-3 AWACS aircraft, it's a cargo airframe with a giant, cumbersome radar antenna stuck on top.
  • Then there's the level with the ground transports. They actually stop when there's a sniper nearby, but they're completely oblivious to battle pods and get ripped apart in 5 seconds or less by their guns.
  • Izzy is even worse — she has weapons, but she also has the crappiest AI on the market, nonexistent armor, and a tendency to think that she can take on the entire rebel army at once.
  • The icing on the cake is that you have absolutely no support in any of these missions. Except for Izzy when she's in a Veritech, but she's absolutely useless, and even worse when she sticks herself in a Cat's Eye.
• As in above, escorting bombers in Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe is actually quite fun. They don't call those B-17 bombers "flying fortresses" for no reason, after all. They have several gunner positions for defense and can tank quite a few shots from enemy fighters.
• Sierra Ops Episode 2: There is a sidequest where you must defend three increasingly large convoys of defenseless, unmanned mining transports from Ares forces. Thankfully, the game lets you recover between each convoy, and completing the mission without losing a single transport will net you a hefty monetary reward, an achievement, and the respect of a disgruntled senior commodore.
• The mobile HQ in Starscape has firepower and health comparable (if not superior) to the player's ship, but it's so big and slow that it doesn't even bother trying to dodge enemy fire. It also has problems with swarms of weak enemies, as all five guns target the same enemy at the same time.
• Vega Strike has it. The good thing, the random generator tend to assign heavy fighter / superiority fighter as an escortee and they don't hold against the player what minor damage pirates may inflict before being ripped apart. With less protected ships and/or Aera it's much trickier, since you need to stay reasonably close, keep an eye on the escortee (they currently don't try to fly as a formation) and preferrably have both a long-range laser to "distract" the attackers and more powerful weapons to destroy them quickly.
• Wing Commander:
  • Wing Commander in all its sequels has had escort missions aplenty, though thankfully most of the ships are relatively durable. One exception to that was the Ralari in the Kurasawa 2 mission, in the original game, in which the player had to escort a captured enemy ship. Going strictly by the book, it's theoretically possible to beat this without cheating, but exceedingly frustrating.
  • Even worse than the skipper mission example above is the first Oxford mission in Wing Commander Privateer, widely acknowledged as the most difficult mission in that game if not the whole series. You see, when you arrive in the mission area, the ship you're supposed to escort (a Drayman freighter, with all the durability of a soap bubble) is already there being attacked by 3-4 light fighters. If you kill the fighters and land before you get the "Mission Complete" radio message, you still fail the mission.
  • One wingman (Maniac) from the original game was particularly obnoxious, though. He's a hotshot who ignores your orders and has a tendency to fly directly into the crossfire and generally screw up missions. Fortunately, if you "accidentally" shoot him down, the only penalty is that you have to fly the rest of the missions from that arc solo. Not a big loss, given the wingman AI, beyond him giving the enemy someone else to shoot at instead of you or the ship you and he are escorting. In fact, at one point, your CO tells you that if Maniac acts up, you have permission to shoot him down — and advises you to do it with your guns rather than waste missiles.
• Escorting bombers or recon planes in Wings of Glory is actually pretty fun. These planes are quite formidable targets, with forward and rear firing guns, as well as the ability to absorb a lot of damage. Also, failing these missions doesn't result in a game over as long as you survive, so the stress of being required to succeed isn't there.
• In WolfQuest, the final mission is to take your pups to the final rendezvous point. The fact that they walk much slower than you, need frequent feeding, can only cross the river in about three spots without drowning, and are very vulnerable to hungry eagles and coyotes, can make this task difficult. (Of course, if you have only one or two pups left at this point, you can just carry them all the way.)
• X3: Terran Conflict sees random freighter pilots offer you missions to escort them to a station in the neighboring sector, often for a nice reward. The correct answer is "Hell, no." The freighters are built from wet newspapers, piloted by first-grade Artificial Stupidity, and attract Respawning Enemies which spawn within a dozen kilometers from the freighters and immediately start spamming missiles. At high combat ranks the mission will spawn multiple destroyers, and the freighters are just fast enough to force you into at best a corvette or fast frigate to be able to keep up. On the plus side, you can pad your Alliance Meter by blowing up the stupid amount of Pirates or Xenon; even if you fail the mission, you'll get a huge reputation bonus for blowing up the pirate escort ships and capital ships.
  • The exception that proves the rule is the single escort mission in the Terran Plot. This is the only such mission you can reasonably complete without the above exploit, because the enemies spawn once at a scripted location, and you have additional naval forces backing you up.
  • A number of Game Mods exist to avert at least some of the escort mission's problems, such as being able to control the rate at which the NPC freighters are allowed to move so that one can escort them in a slow Mile-Long Ship to deal with the enemy capital sihps.

Stealth-Based Game

• The PC version of Assassin's Creed had missions where you had to escort a friendly NPC to the edge of town and would inevitably be attacked once or twice along the way. As if it wasn't bad enough that the inclusion of these missions was being promoted as the "Director's Cut," the NPC will walk at a pace which is naturally faster than your walking speed, but of course slower than your running speed.
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty:
    • There's a segment in which the player has to escort the previous game's main character's best friend's sister (yes, really) through several water-filled levels on piggy-back, as she is phobic of water. The player also has to spray bugs with coolant in order to scare them out of her path, and if she is seen by a guard, she is identified as a "possible hostile," causing an attack squadron to descend on her — she will curl up into a fetal position and scream loudly as she is shot.
      
      Gratefully, there is a cathartic way of circumventing the bug problem; just knock Emma's silly arse out and drag her onto the elevator.
    • Towards the end, Raiden and Snake go for a last charge down the halls of Arsenal, killing everything. Either Snake or Raiden's death causes a game over. On easy difficulty levels Snake brings an M4 and effortlessly slaughters everyone under his own steam, leaving Raiden with not a lot to do other than pick up boxes of ammo and watch. On hard difficulty levels, Snake only brings a handgun and is a liability, requiring constant protection, and on Extreme he's an outright moron, standing perfectly still while the enemy soldiers hit him with their swords. Raiden can either encircle him, deflecting bullets and chopping up anyone who approaches, or knock him out and drag his unconscious body through the level.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, you must escort EVA after she is injured. She moves slow and loses stamina very fast, causing her to crouch down and tell you she can't continue until you feed her. To make matters worse, whereas other jungle areas seemed full of edible wildlife, this one is sparse in it. You can, however, knock her out and drag her body, then wake her up when she is needed. She can fire a weapon, although at a very slow rate.
  • And in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, you get a lovely mission in which you must carry a little kid through a ravine thick with enemies. While escorting four more little kids. Who run straight toward the enemy if you don't watch them carefully. While guards who've discovered the kids' empty cell come up behind you. While a helicopter searches overhead. And probably while the suppressor on your tranq gun is wearing out. And Lucifer help you if you didn't know this was coming up beforehand and didn't wait for nightfall before busting the kids out.
• Syphon Filter:
  • About half the missions in the series, especially escorting Gregorov out of prison, which is also partly a Stealth-Based Mission.
  • The Omega Strain has a mission in Belarus where you have to escort steel mill workers to a bomb shelter, and they tend to run into your line of fire, resulting in collateral damage. Then in the second Yemen mission, you have to provide sniper cover for Zohar while he searches for the virus container, then after he climbs up to your position, Hold the Line against Elite Mooks until Gunship Rescue arrives.
• In Thief the second mission tasks you with sneaking into a prison so that you can jailbreak a certain character and escort him out again. Once you get inside you discover that the prisoner is already dead, so your objectives are changed accordingly. The second game does something similar, in that your task is to help someone reach a certain room and leave. Since he waits for your signal, this generally involves clearing a path and then signalling him before looting the rest of the building.

Survival Horror

• Cold Fear includes brief and rather painless escort elements, which is even lampshaded. The Final Boss battle is also an escort, and not nearly as painless.
• The Evil Within has a few instances where you meet up with Joseph and you two have to complete the level together. Luckily, Joseph is a fantastic escortee - he has infinite ammo, good danger senses, and a ton of health you can recover for him for free. In a later mission, he loses his gun but gets an infinite ax that kills generic enemies in one hit. The levels where you have to keep an eye on him are also mercifully short. Any other instances of escorting NPCs makes them invincible, as well.
• Fatal Frame:
  • Throughout roughly half of Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, you're accompanied by your twin sister. Of course, you're the one with the spirit-warding camera, so she can't fight off any ghosts that attack. The ghosts seem split evenly on whether they attack you or her. When they attack her it's a bit easier, since it allows you to carefully line up a devastating shot without worrying about your health. However, if she gets attacked enough she can die, although this is really only an issue on the higher difficulty levels.
  • Fatal Frame: Maiden of Black Water has the protagonist be followed by an NPC in some of the sections of the game. Fortunately, they seem invincible, which makes the game less frustrating when one particular segment requires you to escape from Ouse Kurosawa and said NPC can't be controlled.
• In Siren 1, you have to escort characters who are slower than the main character, unable to defend themselves in any way (other than ineffectively trying to escape the enemies), and very, very weak. Snipers are found from almost every level and they can each kill an escort with a single bullet.
• In Project Firestart, after you rescue Mary in the cryogenic chamber, you must protect her from harm while leading her to a safer hiding place. She walks instead of running like Jon, so you don't want to get too far ahead of her. Possibly justified in that she was hiding because of injuries, though she doesn't elaborate. Also, once you know where you're supposed to take her, the trip is actually fairly short.
• Resident Evil 4:
  • Not only is Ashley smart enough to get out of your line of fire, and not only can you order her to stay back while you go ahead and clean out the enemies, the game even provides the occasional place to hide her from view entirely until such time as the coast is clear. The developers also tailored the areas where she follows you to be more suited to protecting her, as well as made a point to remove her from your care (by being recaptured, for example) for areas where protecting her would be too difficult or unfair of a challenge (there is not a single boss battle where you have to protect her). Capcom seems to have spent some time making sure having her around wouldn't cause players to throw things at the TV. And if that wasn't painless enough, there is (in the PS2/Wii versions of the game) a suit of armor for Ashley as a hard-earned alternate outfit that renders her completely invulnerable⁺not even the rocket launcher, the series' code for One-Hit Kill, can hurt her and makes her impossible for Mooks to carry off. It turns her into an amazing trap for your enemies. If you're getting mobbed, put her in the center of a room and your back against a wall. They'll pick her up and immediately fall over which won't stop them from trying while you slowly pick them off. Humorously, aiming at her in this suit no longer cues her to crouch, but to shut the visor on her helmet instead.
  • The Resident Evil 4 (Remake) shifts things a bit. Keeping Ashley alive is both harder and easier: harder in that a number of the hiding spots were pulled, making her follow you for longer stretches at a time; easier in that she no longer has a life bar (and thus doesn't need to be healed), instead being unable to take two hits in a row - and you have ample time (though possibly not opportunity) to rescue her between hits, resetting the counter.
• The Resident Evil: Outbreak duo contain a couple optional examples that you need for 100% Completion but not to actually beat the scenarios. The first game's first scenario, "Outbreak", has an NPC named Bob, a colleague of Mark's, who you can guide to the roof of J's Bar, earning a few cutscenes of his zombification as you go; he finally succumbs to it up there. Meanwhile, File #2's final scenario, "End of the Road", has Linda, an Umbrella researcher whose survival is key to earning a good ending.
• From the Silent Hill franchise:
  • Silent Hill 2 — Although Maria usually stays right behind you, the problems may occur when entering another location. Sometimes she appears in an untoward place - ex. just between you and a monster. That may cause nervous or impatient players to accidentally shoot Maria, meaning game over. Thankfully, you get to deposit her in a sickroom early on in Brookhaven hospital (almost immediately if you already know the code to the 3rd floor's patient wing), but she returns just in time for a final chase sequence that is stupidly hard to get through on higher difficulties even if you are aware that shooting her pursuer can slow him down.
  • In the second half of Silent Hill 4, you have Eileen, who is injured. You can give her a weapon and she can fight and take damage, but she can't die. How much damage she takes, however, determines how fast she walks towards Walter's Death Machine in the final battle. Whether she walks into it or not determines what ending you get.
  • In Silent Hill: Homecoming, there's three of them. The first one, the girl won't go into the pool filled with monsters until AFTER you've taken care of them, also she really runs quickly enough to escape some of the monsters (unfortunately, sometimes it doesn't work). The second one, the guy has a gun, unlimited ammo, and good enough aim that he can shoot enemies in their weak points and one hit kill them. Third one, you're equipped with minimal weaponry and your escort dies with a couple of hits.
• In S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, there's a sidequest in the Wild Territory where you rescue an ecologist scientist, Dr. Kruglov, and escort him through an area infested with hostile mercenaries until the entrance to Lake Yantar. While he does lead and only has a basic 9mm pistol, you have a few major advantages: Kruglov knows how to take cover effectively (in fact his chosen path skirts away from where the mercs are stationed), he is wearing one of the best armor suits in the game⁺specifically the SSP-99M, and his aim is quite good. Additionally, if you're running a Game Mod or two to fix bugs (such as ZRP), chances are you can sell him a rifle and some ammo to make him an awesome gunfighter. You're rewarded with a USB drive worth some money and the chance to ask a number of lore and worldbuilding questions, plus an SSP-99 anti-anomaly suit when you reach the scientists' bunker at Yantar. As an added benefit to keeping him alive, you'll escort him again instead of Assistant Semenov, his far more fragile^note outfitted with the non-bulletproof SSP-99 suit and cowardly^note when an emission hits in a cutscene, Semenov talks over the radio about running back and leaving you behind, while Kruglov heatedly refuses to leave your side substitute, in the second escort mission where you go out to take measurements so your psy-protection helmet can be calibrated and have to protect him from zombified stalkers.
• In The Suffering, Torque has the opportunity to engage in a few of these. The escortees are usually (but not always) armed, reasonably tough, and able to defend themselves pretty well. Torque can simply gun them down to skip the mission, but this seriously dings his Karma Meter - allowing them to die via monster does not change the Karma Meter, and completing the mission increases it.
• In The Thing (2002), various levels had one or more characters that you have to keep alive. This is made slightly easier by the fact that you can give them spare guns/ammunition, which they will use.

Third-Person Shooter

• Subverted hilariously in Armed and Dangerous - several levels require you to free kidnapped peasants from captivity and take them back to their homes. However, instead of having them follow you around normally, the game simply has their character model dragged along behind the player like a ragdoll. You can also free multiple hostages before returning them home, resulting in a crowd of madly flailing peasants flopping around behind you.
• Army of Two subverts this shortly after you get to your escort target. His copter goes boom and it's "go back to kill every living thing in sight."
• Crimson Sea has a notoriously hard level where you escort the President of the planet through an alien-infested factory filled with conveyors, crushing blocks, and inexplicable dead-ends. Most frustratingly, the fat guy in his late fifties is somehow faster than the player.
• Dirge of Cerberus has a lot of escort missions, but the first one is following this little boy who runs at your walking pace... this wouldn't be so bad if he actually ran the entire time, but he walks even slower for no reason when he shows he can run. On the plus side, he crouches in a corner whenever enemies attack, making it easier for you; on the other hand, he stands frightened for several seconds before the snipers take a shot right in front of the final door... meaning if he had kept going, you needn't have bothered wasting bullets. The plus point is that none of your escorts have to survive for you to finish the game.
• In the third-fourth of Chapter 17 in Kid Icarus: Uprising, Pit has to keep at least one of the two Centurions (or their two replacements) alive while they carry his platform to the boss. The Centurions are actually supposed to be escorting him, but as Palutena puts it, they aren't very reliable.
• Max Payne gives us a few.
  • In the original, you have to escort a scientist to open up a keypad-locked door. Some mooks attack as you go, but with a conservative use of Bullet Time and the usual dodge-and-shoot gameplay, they're not an extreme hassle; you can kill them even before the lab rat gets there.
  • The second game has an Enemy Mine situation where Max has to protect the whiny, helpless Vinnie Gognitti, who's stuck inside a giant cartoon character costume with a bomb in it. Annoyingly, this situation turns out to be a "Shaggy Dog" Story — if Max turned around and walked away the moment he met the guy, the overall plot would have been exactly the same.
  • The third game has a section in which Passos is making a run for it and you need to protect him by sniping enemies. Not only will he die instantly in a cutscene if an enemy gets too close, he seems to have picked up an Idiot Ball, as he won't even try to pick up a gun to defend himself despite normally being able to handle himself in a fight. The previous chapter also has an Unexpected Shmup Level escort segment where Max covers the escaping Giovanna from a helicopter.
• SOCOMUS Navy Seals: In SOCOM 2, there is a mission where you have to escort a scientist through an enemy base to inspect containers and determine if they contain chemical weapons. This scientist is unarmed, yet he will often casually stroll between you and the enemies as you are engaged in shootouts with them, even if he is ordered to hold position. Thankfully this problem can be avoided by ordering him to hold position at the start of the level. Then you can go kill all the enemies in the base without him, go back to pick him up, and take him to inspect the containers without any threats present that could harm him.
• Splatoon: The Tower Control ranked mode is basically this combined with King of the Hill. The objective is to "escort" the eponymous Tower to the other end of the map. The tower moves along a predetermined path and the speed depends on how many team members are on it, making it a cross of the "barges headlong into danger" and "moves at the speed of a glacier" type missions.
• In Terminator: Salvation for the arcade, the second mission has your "main objective" to escort humans away from the machines. You don't have to protect them as their deaths are all scripted events, and they don't get hurt at all if you accidentally shoot them. And it's a good thing too- the game is already very hard on its own.
• Warframe:
  • In typical rescue missions, you have to get into enemy's jail block, free the captive target and get them to the extraction point. Thankfully, they have a regenerating shield bar, basic training in Le Parkour, the good sense to stay a comfortable distance from you and the ability to use a pistol if you're willing to loan one to them. Additionally, they don't actually need to make it to the extraction point. If you (and your teammates, in co-op) make it to the extraction point and the Rescue target is still alive, it's an automatic mission success regardless of where the rescue target is on the level or their current HP. This doesn't often come into play, but it means if their pathfinding bugs out and they get stuck in a wall you don't have to dick around with getting them unstuck. You just truck on ahead until you either reach the evac point or they warp to your position. It can also be handy in the more vertically oriented levels where you can go "ahead" and still keep enemy fire mostly trained on you.
  • Another possible mission variant is "Hijack", which involves moving a target to the extraction point while enemies fire at it and you. Against the Grineer, your team is stealing one of the cores used for their Fomorian ships; against the Corpus, you're stealing a rover that has supplies and other goods salvaged from crashed ships. The target drains your Deflector Shields in order to move and enemies can start moving it backward if it's left inert for long enough. Its own health also depletes over time, but that can be somewhat remedied with the "Rejuvenation" Aura that can help slow the drain down (which helps immensely, as it getting destroyed is an instant mission failure). Certain healing abilities can also be used on the target.
  • There is also the "Defection" mission, where the Kavor need to be escorted to a waiting transport ship; catch is that the Infestation is airborne and slowly killing the crew. Medical towers are available to heal the Kavor, but they need power cells to remain active. Much like the Rescue and Hijack missions, Frames with healing powers can keep the crewmates alive for much longer.

Turn-Based Strategy

• Front Mission:
  • In Front Mission 3, there's an escort mission where you have to rescue some scientists. Your team are in Humongous Mecha. The enemy are in Humongous Mecha. The scientists are not. Guess how well the scientists stand up to weapons designed to blow up giant walking tanks?
  • Front Mission 4 features an escort in which your suicidal chipmunk is driving a tank. Unfortunately, a tank is on the low side of the food chain when everybody else is driving mechs. You lose the mission if he dies and he charges the enemy's well-fortified, long-range missile heavy defensive line as fast as he can. You basically have to mimic his suicidal behavior and cut down wanzers with 40% dodge rates as fast as he approaches them while sucking up the missile hits!
• A fair number of the missions in Devil Survivor qualify, making the game's battle save feature a necessity. Made even more necessary by the fact that the characters you're trying to escort might have a tendency to attack opponents they can't beat or even attack you.
• Although not technically an escort, the heroes of Final Fantasy Tactics must prevent the death of one or more characters in specific fights; if they fall, it's an instant game over. This is especially irritating in the infamous Riovanes Rooftop mission, where the character in question has a tendency to charge directly at the opponent and get stabbed to death before your team can catch up. If the dice don't land just right, you can lose the game before your first turn. It's not even terribly unlikely that this will happen; it's not unheard of for some players to spend hours retrying the fight (with accompanying cutscene to be sped through) before finally getting a turn off. On the other hand, another mission forces you to escort Agrias, who can (and usually will) cut a bloody swath through a good chunk of the battlefield full of mooks solo, which is a lot more satisfying to play. There's also the mission where you have to protect Olan Durai from bandits. Olan has the power to freeze every enemy on the map with a single move, and it takes no MP to cast. Who's protecting who, exactly? Granted, he's a Squishy Wizard, but the enemy can't kill him when they can't even move.
• Final Fantasy Tactics A2's Time to Act. How about escorting five characters with one of your own, with the mission failing when you lose even a single escortee? How about having one of the escortees insisting on using Red Gear to give Haste to a randomly selected team, that either causes the enemies to reach your escortees and kill them faster, or causes your escortees to reach the enemies and get killed faster?
• Anytime there are civilians on the battlefield in the Fire Emblem games. Since they have no combat abilities whatsoever, they die in one or two hits from the enemy. Even though their survival is generally not required in order for you to complete the chapter, most of the time, they provide you with some nice rewards if you save them; for example, in Genealogy of the Holy War, they would give you a free level-up when you save them.
• One mission in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn turns Elincia, Queen of Crimea (and of course a mission-critical unit) into an NPC. She has an annoying tendency to make a beeline directly into enemy crossbow users, whose damage modifiers versus her flying mount ensures that she will die in one or two hits.
• Jeanne d'Arc only has one escort mission. Unfortunately, it is quite frustrating. The character you are escorting has the worst armor and no weapons. He also follows a preset path, which puts him in line with an archer that will instantly kill him with one shot. If you do not rush your units to kill the archer before he gets there, it is basically impossible. Luckily, there is a way to cheat in this mission. Move your characters so that his preset path is blocked, forcing him to move much slower. This gives you more time to intercept things.
• Several levels in Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle require you to escort Toad (or Toadette) across the battlefield. While the game throws you a bone by making Toad controllable, he lacks the ability to do anything other than move, and his health and movement range are both poor compared to the other characters. Beep-0 himself is rather distraught when he learns Toad got lost again (and thus, will need escorting again).
  Beep-0: Oh, #%$*@ - not again.
• The Nintendo Wars series has missions in the campaign modes revolving around either protecting or destroying key units. The fact that the units follow your orders (only moving and attacking when you order them to) rather than moving around dumbly makes this a lot more tolerable. In Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, they tend to be AI-controlled, although the AI is smart enough not to rush to their doom... except for a certain Heroic Sacrifice, where you could've done the mission more easily if you had kept control of the medium tank.
• Chapter 15 of Symphony of War involves trying to protect 4 defenseless children as they advance to the exit. As you'd expect, this can be infuriating, as the kids are completely brainless and do nothing but move forward, making it easy for them to outrun you as you are fighting the enemies. To make matters worse, the enemies are all programmed to completely ignore your troops and focus entirely on slaughtering the kids. Fortunately, you don't have to save all of them, though you do get an achievement for pulling this off.
• Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together doesn't have many missions where failing to protect the escort is a Game Over, but there are a LOT of missions where a recruitable character will be a NPC starting near the enemies and you must protect it if you want to recruit it later. However, regardless of their strength, the NPCs will follow only one strategy: to see which enemy characters are in their range and attack the weakest of them. And there goes the Squishy Wizard who happens to have no MP at the moment to try and hit that scary, heavily armored Terror Knight with his wooden stick because the Knight is the only enemy in his range (wich fills the "weakest enemy" quota).
• X-COM:
  • Terror Missions in XCOM: Enemy Unknown are a pain to complete because the civilians you are supposed to save are dumb as hell. They will barely move, and will stay hunkered down even when there is a Muton standing several feet from them in a flanking position. They won't even make an effort to get closer to your troops, even if they are in plain sight, forcing you to risk at least one of your soldiers by sending him to stand right next to the civilian. Thankfully, once you reach them, they will automatically run to the extraction point and be out of your hair, and a few of them getting killed is basically unavoidable: you can expose them to Friendly Fire with no direct consequences and as long as less than quarter of them die, you'll still get full benefits from doing the mission.
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown has several of these in the form of randomly-assigned Council missions. They're a bit easier than most examples, given that you can actually control the VIP that you have to protect, but that doesn't change the fact that they can be killed in a single hit with the aliens' most basic weapon.
  • The base game also skewed enemy priority, to the point that given a choice between shooting your soldier with a 50% chance to hit, and shooting your VIP with an 80% chance to hit, they'll aim for the soldier every time. The expansion pack Enemy Within, however, re-prioritizes enemy actions, to the point that your VIPs will die a lot.
  • The expansion also features EXALT extraction missions where you have to extract an undercover operative who has infiltrated an EXALT cell. In addition to you having full control over the agent, the agent is actually one of your own soldiers and, unlike the VIPs from the Council missions, can be armed with a pistol weapon and one piece of extra gear. Thus depending on the soldier's skills, the agent can be just as deadly as one of your soldiers in a firefight.
  • Likewise, in XCOM 2 you can get similar missions where you have to escort a VIP to safety, possibly after breaking them out of a cell. While it is somewhat harder than the first game due to most of them being timed, this type of missions are still highly desirable to get because the VIPs you rescue will permanently join you as Scientists, Engineers, or troops. In addition, if one of your troops is captured (through mind control after all of your other units are killed/evacuated), you have the possibility of rescuing them through one of these.

Wide-Open Sandbox

• In Dead Island, escorted NPCs tend to be armed with only the bare minimum of equipment and for some reason prefer to charge head first into Thugs and Butchers, the twin Demonic Spider types of the game — or allow themselves to be surrounded by the Goddamned Bats.
  • The most notable of these escort missions is Ope, the old shaman of whom you must escort through a zombie infested jungle. The old man might as well have a twig as a weapon, and likes to think that running into that group of poisonous zombies is a great idea. The fact that this game is designed for 4 players and Continuing is Painful, if you are playing alone, you will have a REALLY bad time.
  • The problem is compounded by the fact that if you fail the mission, you will respawn at a checkpoint without recovering all the ammunition and grenades you expended in a vain attempt to save the escorted person from their suicidal stroll into zombie mobs.
• This is a large gameplay element of the Dead Rising series, where (in most games) you have the option of escorting survivors to a safe area whilst protecting them from zombies.
  • The first game's survivors are easily the hardest to escort in the series, without the advances in AI the survivors in future installments would have.
  • Dead Rising 2:
    • Some of the survivors are intentionally slow, either due to poor legs or an injury. They travel at a glacial speed unless you can carry them.
    • Dean is the worse example. He's injured, and Chuck even asks if he needs a shoulder back to the safe-house. Dean refuses to be carried. He'll slowly, slowly limp, and while you can use a wheelchair to make things go faster, it's still annoying.
    • Find a Leadership magazine, and even the slow characters (save one, who is in a mermaid suit) become almost as fast as you, and will shoot many a zombie in your path.
  • Dead Rising 2: Case West is a subversion of this. There are still survivors in the game, complete with requests (arguably less ridiculous than the main game). But once you deliver what the survivor needs, they'll make their way out of the facility on their own. Justified in that they work for Phenotrans, so they'll know their way around the facility.
• Far Cry 3 has an especially sadistic example. You have to escort a friendly NPC as he rushes into a burning village. Through a minefield. Straight into enemy fire. He is actually smart enough to avoid all the mines, but he rushes towards the enemy guns at such a relentless pace that the player will likely detonate them as they struggle to keep up, killing him with the blast. Once into the village, he will suddenly rush off around corners and will die very quickly if there happens to be an enemy there, forcing you back to the checkpoint in the middle of the minefield. If he would just remain calm and keep his head down to allow the player to methodically eliminate the assault-rifle wielding psychopaths that are looking for him, then the mission would be much less frustrating.
• The "Goat MMO Simulator" level of Goat Simulator features a quest where you have to escort an NPC named "McSlowpants". Thankfully, there's nothing stopping you from grabbing him with your tongue and dragging him to his destination.
• G-Police has plenty of those. You had to escort various vehicles as they ssslllooowly made their way through the city to their destination, apparently oblivious to the clouds of enemy fighters swarming around them (evasive maneuvers? What evasive maneuvers?). The most infuriating thing was that most of the vehicles you had to protect were NPC-controlled version of generic vehicles you'd see all the time in normal traffic, and those sure could go fast.
• The climax of the first island's plot in Grand Theft Auto III involves an escort Sniping Mission, where you have to provide sniper cover for an associate who has a penchant for jogging calmly into massed automatic rifle fire as soon as you take your first shot.
• Grand Theft Auto IV:
  • There are some missions where you're accompanied by a few partners in crime. All three of Patrick McReary's missions, for example, have him accompanying you, and if he dies, you fail. While this can occasionally be a recipe for annoyance because Patrick tends to charge headlong into enemy fire, he can take quite a bit of damage (more than you can, in fact), and helps to draw the enemies' fire, letting you pick off enemies and cops without getting shot at as much. He's an expert at using the game's cover system (one case where the computer actually cheats in your favor), and is packing serious heat of his own, meaning he'll be able to take out enemies as fast as you can. Another case of the Escort Mission adding a slight bit of difficulty to the game without being overly frustrating, and sometimes actually being helpful.
  • Also, any mission where Little Jacob joins you. The situations feel similar to Patrick's missions, except he never charges into certain death, usually advancing as you do, and it somehow feels like he's the one escorting you than you escorting him.
  • GTA4 also includes a Co-Op multiplayer mode called "Hangman's NOOSE," which requires the team to escort an NPC mafia boss to safety. Because the boss is somewhat intelligent, the mission is short, and the case rewards are very high, this might be one of the few escort missions on this list that players seek out and play repeatedly.
• In the penultimate mission of Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, Toni steals a police car to protect Salvatore, who is transported in an armored truck with a police escort, however, the convoy is attacked by the Sicilian Mafia, who want him dead.
• Any mission with Lance Vance in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City automatically became an escort mission due to his unerring incompetence. Hell, even Tommy lampshades this when he tells Lance "he always keeps screwing things up"! He's a fairly good shot, to his credit, but that's about his only redeeming quality. Any mission he's in is a babysitting mission: get five feet ahead of him, and "You left Lance behind", shoot at enemies while he runs around in front of you like a maniac, "You killed Lance!"... if you DON'T shoot at enemies while he runs around in front of you like a maniac, "Lance was killed!". His only competency is shown when he fights you as the final boss, in which he can take two rockets to the face without flinching.
• Saints Row 2 is generally pretty good with its escort missions, until "Corporate Meltdown" in the DLC, which demands that you protect a fragile nuclear waste truck from suicidal armored vans, rocket-launching mooks on rooftops, and attack copters. And you have to do it three times. And you can't save between two and three. And you're in a helicopter with slippery controls.
• Scarface: The World Is Yours has one in the mission to take over the Babylon Club, which required Tony to protect a VIP who acted in the typical "stupid escortee" manner.
• Way of the Samurai 4 has one where you have to escort a language teacher either to the school or out of it, depending on if the school is open or not in your particular save file, as the xenophobic Prajna faction want him dead. Amusingly, if the second variation is available, you can turn it down by saying “Escort missions suck!”
• [PROTOTYPE]:
  • One mission features you escorting a specialized pump vehicle that every enemy in the area wants to kill, with only paper-thin armor as defense. The only plausible way to do it is to forget about your cool superpowers and hop in a tank, and this isn’t even the most annoying part of the mission - in the second half it parks and all the other military vehicles wander off and let you deal with the horde of monsters out to kill it. The driver also whines at you over the radio whenever a zombie looks at him funny.
  • One mission had you escort a prototype tank while it clears out Hives on its way to the final objective. Thankfully, the game gives you a Gunship for this stage and the tank is escorted by additional Gunships and other normal tanks that help alleviate some of the work. Subverted halfway through the mission when the tank driver is killed and the player has to drive the tank himself to the final objective while fighting off both the infected and the military.
  • Another mission featured you "escorting" a Leader Hunter to a location where you could keep it contained. You had to attack it, or else it would get bored and lash out at passersby, but still keep it alive. The Leader Hunter is about the size of an elephant and durable enough so that the abuse you and the marines dish out shouldn't even severely damage it, meaning the only problem you should have is the fact that your "escortee" is attacking you and hits like a train.
  • In the same vein as the Leader Hunter, the penultimate boss fight has you “escorting” another (this time hostile) prototype tank around the city until it loses its Contractual Boss Immunity against hijacking (destroying it otherwise fails the mission). All of the fighting is done at checkpoints where the boss tank surrounds itself with normal tanks, which must be destroyed to proceed - but they cluster up so close that they’re prone to shooting each other and all of your normal anti-armor attacks will damage the boss tank with their splash damage, and unlike the Leader Hunter it isn’t nearly durable enough to handle this.
  • There are a couple of points where one has to escort a human, but they realize how fragile they are and demand an armored transport to go anywhere, turning them into much more tolerable forced vehicle segments.
  • [PROTOTYPE 2] has a couple where you join a squad of Blackwatch soldiers and have to keep them intact until they lead you to whatever target they're after. They're much tougher than soldiers normally are and can take a beating, but if you commit to being useless they'll eventually get killed because their weapons don't do damage.

Unsorted

• The first Galaxy Angel videogame has several missions where you have to escort a group of civilian ships towards a safe zone. The sequels, Moonlit Lovers and Eternal Lovers only have one each, the former only in Forte's route (although the civilian ship turns out to be a trap), and the latter at the start when Lushati and Wein show up escaping from the Valfask.
  • The sequel trilogy Galaxy Angel II only has two escort mission during the final game. One involves saving the shuttle with Anise's acquaintances inside and the other is escorting the fairies from Sprite away from Will invaders. The Magiic stage in the final game arguably counts as the third as you need to protect them as they travel to fixed positions on the map.
• The escort missions in GearHead have you using your mecha to protect a transport truck from raiders as it drives along a short road. Unfortunately, as you progress in the game, all your opponents become stronger, greatly increasing the range, accuracy and power of their attacks. As a result, the defenseless truck will generally be targeted with a barrage of powerful, expensive, area-affecting missiles before you can even spot the raiders' mecha, inevitably being destroyed by the first hit. Luckily, these missions are all optional.
• Escorting Mandrake in Hard Corps: Uprising shouldn't be much of a problem if you've got it memorized or have the right weapon.
• The online strategy RPG League of Angels may as well be called "Escort Mission: The Game". You always have an angel behind your party, and while she doesn't fight and can't be harmed by your opponents, as your party is hurt, her Rage Meter (something all characters in this game have) increases, and when full, she unleashes a powerful attack on your foes. You start the game with a weak angel, but the plot requires you to rescue imprisoned ones and purify the land, so you can recruit more, and also assign each member of your party a Guardian Angel from the ones you recruit for additional buffs; you also increase their levels and powers with items found in the game or gotten from in-game achievements or the online store.
• Mario Party 9 has a unique take on the escort trope for single player mode. The game plays like a normal multiplayer game, but there is always one player that is working against you and if that player wins, you lose. If you or any other player wins the game, you still win. If you are losing by a long shot and have no way to win, you can "escort" the other players on the team by helping them win or sabotaging the enemy player so that you can still win.
• In Wild 9 you can escort Pokkit, who has an arsenal of weapons which can blow away any enemy, the same goes for Nitro, who by just moving him will cause him to explosively sneeze, which is actually required to open some doors, thankfully, it does not damage you.
• Super Robot Wars: Original Generation:
  • The series is pretty good about Escort Missions. Almost always, the people you have to keep alive are fairly powerful and under your direct control. Sometimes, though, they have to pass through a heavily fortified position with multiple enemies aiming for them, without taking a single hit. This is alleviated, though, by incredible dodging skills.
  • However, there's one mission in the second game where you have to guide an NPC transport ship carrying a prototype mecha through a literal swarm of enemies. The ship has only average HP and defenses, never defends itself (despite being listed as carrying missiles on-board), can't dodge for beans, and isn't controllable. The ship itself can take six or seven hits before going down, but that's considerably less useful when there are twenty or so enemies aiming for it at once. Adding to the dilemma is that, if you want the Skill Point for this stage, you can't even let the thing get SCRATCHED. The only way to achieve this is to send all of your mechs as far forward into the enemy as possible, causing them to attack you instead of the transport. Oh, but if any of THEM die, you fail also.
  • Super Robot Wars 3 pulls this straight with a kick in the balls, where you have to keep Ryune alive while she's surrounded by enemies... And she will attack you. The version of that battle in the first OG game is far more merciful: You don't have to protect her, and if she dies, she just instantly regains her full health. Oh, and she doesn't attack you until after the bad guys are all gone.
• Urban Chaos: Riot Response sits somewhere in the middle. Partners in need of rescue will be killed in short order unless you help them; but once they are saved they'll stick close to you, enemies don't consider them top priority, and if armed they'll provide cover fire for you.
• Star Wars: Republic Commando had a somewhat amusing mission in which you had to escort a Wookiee past a pair of General Grievous's bodyguards. It is possible for him to die, but he can take so much damage that it's practically impossible for the MagnaGuards to kill him, as they spend most of the time focusing on you and your squad.
• Siren: Blood Curse gives players a much harder time than the first game. Considering you play as 7 different characters across the 24 missions, you have missions where you have to snipe to protect a defenseless man and then lead him to safety, snipe to protect a little girl who's afraid of you and "lead" her to safety (i.e. approach her until she runs off in the safest direction), escort said little girl to safety while killing anything that would kill her, lead your ex-wife to safety (thankfully she's armed and does a great job of fighting on her own), and protect a woman who can't fight but can thankfully take a ton of damage.
  • Siren 2 has some too, but most of the time the escort is armed, durable, or smart enough to get out of the way. Ikuko is a pain, though, because she keeps using her sightjacking ability to slow enemies and sometimes stays like that for a little while.
• When the first part of the last quest in Fallout 3 actually starts, you quickly realize you aren't really "protecting" Liberty Prime from anything; you're just trying to kill some enemies before the unstoppable giant robot nukes, vaporizes, or steps on them (possibly depriving you of much-needed XP). You still have to wait for the robot at two different points, though. Given the large amount of of either invulnerable or else very tough npcs escorting you as well, this sequence is often derided as an inversion of the trope. Also, Paladin Vargas, one of the previously invulnerable characters that assisted you during Following in his Footsteps, has his Gameplay Ally Immortality removed for this quest, and does not appear in Broken Steel, implying that his death is canon.
  • In an earlier level, you need to escort scientists trying to escape Enclave soldiers. Fortunately the soldiers have the good sense to target you instead of them, the scientists will usually stay behind you, and you can tell them to stay put while you clear out the room ahead. Also, of the four scientists, only one is required to survive, and she has Gameplay Ally Immortality and can only be briefly knocked unconscious by enemies. You can also give another of the scientists a gun, but this only makes things harder as he'll now hold his ground and fight enemies instead of sensibly running away, causing him to die very quickly as he is very weak and can only survive a couple of hits.
  • There was also the immensely suicidal Sticky, an outcast of Little Lamplight you could escort to Big Town. Unfortunately he is a complete idiot who would willingly attack Super Mutants and Radscorpions with his fist despite having given him a revolver. If you don't fancy being masochistic, you can use fast travel to get to Big Town, thus bypassing any combat.
  • Speaking of Big Town, you have to rescue Red and Shorty from a Super Mutant stronghold as part of the "Big Trouble" sidequest. Saving Shorty is optional, but you fail the quest if Red dies. You only have to get them out of the Police HQ, then you can quick-travel back to town, provided you killed any enemies outside.
• Final Fantasy VI has an escort mission involving Guest-Star Party Member Banon. If he dies during combat, the game's over. He has somewhat fewer HP than your other characters, but is fully controllable and has a free healing ability, making this not only much less odious than most Escort Missions, but a great way to Level Grind if you set up the controls just right.
• Seems like the makers of Magical Battle Arena has had bad experiences with Escort Missions in the past, since the Protect Hayate with Vita mission, the one Escort Mission in the Lyrical Pack, isn't the hair-pullingly frustrating kind. Sure, Hayate is a sitting duck here, but she can take a lot of hits and her attackers are just three easy to kill Joke Characters who are quick to choose you over Hayate as their target. Essentially, the Escort Mission's only hard if you're bad at using Vita.
• One of the early missions in Imperium Galactica was to escort the Admiral. You could completely ignore him and all that would happen was to get a "Where the hell were you!?" message at the end of it. Later escort missions you did have to turn up for, though.
• One of the missions in Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising has you escorting a group of scientists escaping from the Cabal. They proceed to patiently wait in their base while you clear the entire map of everything that moves and set up turrets at their destination, make sure to stay behind your tanks once they get rolling, and even once the enemies start growing out of the ground (literally), they will target your units before they turn on the convoy. It's... refreshingly not frustrating.
• Alone in the Dark: Inferno. Sarah, who accompanies the hero in the first half of the game before finally deciding to remain in a safe place, acts more as a tag-along rather than an actual escort mission, even though you do need her help in certain places. Thankfully, bullets in the head are only minor annoyances for her, and she rarely actively gets in your way. Her comments make you want to mute the TV, though.
• An optional sidequest in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines involves saving former actor Ash Rivers from hunters; there are a couple of ways to go about it, and one of them is to escort him through the sewers. Fortunately, he tends to stay a few metres behind the player, and is capable of defending himself if a hunter gets too close.
• In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the player controls the Prince fighting through mythical monsters to escape the Sands of Time; his only ally is a princess stuck in the same trap. For most of the game she is in the background, nudging you along the right path, like a fairy but not as annoying. She will occasionally enter battle with you, but if she dies in battle, the game is over. You may think about focusing some of your attention toward her, but the monster AI prioritizes you and the princess AI prioritizes on keeping her away. While she is accurate with her arrows, she is not a sniper and may occasionally hit you (with apologies). Her health is also fairly high and will regenerate over time.
  • There are three exceptions to the exception: the first is a room where the only initial entrance/exit is a hole in a wall which is partially blocked by stone debris. Once Farah enters the room, she can't get back out and the enemy AI evenly splits focus between the two of you. The second is one of the times you are separated; she runs into a bit of sand monster trouble and calls out for help. You have to find her before she dies, and the area is somewhat confusing. The third, and worst, is the Tower of Dawn elevator sequence, which simply has so many enemies jammed into a small area that some of them will inevitably target Farah. She doesn't really have that much health when being intentionally attacked, causing her to be killed easily, and there's really nowhere for her to run.
  • Clearly you never encountered the bug where, in the library section that has spike pits, she endlessly walks off the edge and dies. Over and over. And Rewinding doesn't help.
• In Prince of Persia (2008), the Prince (controlled by the player) is escorting Elika on her quest to remove corruption from the fertile grounds. The devs have done their homework, so Elika never gets in your way, obstructs your view or does anything dumb, and follows you well. It also helps that neither of you can die. Since Elika saves the Prince's life whenever he is about to die, in reality, it is Elika who is escorting the Prince.
• Fortunately very little escort action in Rise of Legends, and perhaps the only notable one is actually pretty easy. You have to escort multiple of the same caravan unit across a relatively small map while enemies spawn magically around you, but the caravans have a decent number of hitpoints, provide area healing, and you only have to move one caravan unit at a time, meaning that the next one always comes in fresh.
  • There's also one where the main character Giacomo goes on a heatstroke-induced Mushroom Samba and you have to protect him while he totters around the landscape. This one's somewhat harder.
• In Manhunt you have to escort a vagabond and later a journalist. Since players can ask them to stay hidden, they aren't very annoying.
• In Kingdom Hearts II, there's a part where you need to escort Minnie to her throne while being attacked by a horde of enemies. Luckily, standing next to her and using a reaction command will call upon a semi-powerful light spell that knocks all enemies away. It's actually harder to reach the throne without using this spell. Alternatively, because Minnie only moves forward when you tell her to, it's possible to clear out all the enemies, then call her over.
  • Annoyingly (and unexpectedly) played straight when you fight Barbossa. Jack Sparrow must survive. The game does not tell you this before the fight starts.
  • Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep plays this a little straighter with Jaq the mouse, Snow White and Cinderella, but still not completely straight. Each character will move forward on their own, and if they get attacked, you can use a reaction command that will damage all enemies around them.
    • Assuming of course, you are close enough for the reaction. If not, prepare to game over again and again while you got sidetracked combo-chaining enemies.
• The Simpsons Game has an escort mission in Medal of Honor. Sargent Abraham Simpson explicitly tells you "I know what you're thinking. Not an escort mission. Well deal with it!" This also gets you a collectable cliche which Comic Book Store Guy even goes as far as to say "Worst Video Game Cliche ever!"
• Front Mission: Gun Hazard's escort mission with Luven Al-Habi is a bit of a mixed bag. While he and his wanzer may be easily damaged by enemy fire if he's under-leveled, he has no trouble surviving when he's given a better wanzer to work with. On top of that, he isn't throwing his own bombs around in the escort mission, resulting in much less friendly fire and needless self-damage.
• Traffic Department 2192 is generally not very difficult, with the exception of one mission where you are expected to guide five unarmed trucks filled with medical supplies from one base to another while swarms of enemy crafts attempt to destroy them. Because of the locations that the enemies come from, it is not as simple as merely following the trucks; you have to preemptively destroy the enemy before they even get there, or they will swarm the trucks and easily demolish them. Worse yet, if even one truck is destroyed, your mission is considered a failure.
• The arcade game Ghost Squad (2004) has a variation of this, where you defend your squadmates from attack instead of actually escorting them anywhere. Played straight (well, strait-er) in mission 2, where you escort Hostages and Presidential bodyguards to safety.
  • Luckily, the escort missions are all optional.
• Goes both ways in Left 4 Dead. When it comes to the bots, you have to keep an eye on them because they have a bad habit of wandering into any fire you created or always getting themselves ambushed by special infected when they had a clear shot. It also becomes an escort mission when someone is going to die in the next hit and there are no healing items around. When playing with friends, if you are going to die soon, they will escort you.
  • Admittedly, it helps that the bots, while stupid about how they behave, have ridiculous aim and skill at taking down special infected at a distance. Let's face it, though. Left 4 Dead is one big 4-player online Mutual Escort Mission.
• In The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, you're evidently meant to protect Frodo as Aragorn in the first level, Weathertop. Any sense of actually protecting him is thrown out the windows since the Ringwraiths have long wind-ups for their attacks, and Frodo scampers about Weathertop like a rabbid squirrel until the plot catches up to him and he gets stabbed, at which point it still takes several further blows for him to actually die. It's you that's in danger, not him.
• In Allegiance (2000), a team-based multiplayer flight-sim/strategy hybrid, players must escort mission-critical spaceships such as bombers and troop transports — not because the game has an artificial "requirement" for players to do so, but simply because it's a necessary tactic to beat any competent enemy team. Most ships needing escort are flown by actual human pilots, so Artificial Stupidity does not apply (though the old-fashioned natural sort still might). The only AI-controlled ships requiring escort are miners and constructors, and team commanders can keep an eye on them and order them around to counteract their suicidal tendencies.
• In The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, as one point you must escort the Hulk's ally Leonard Samson through the city while it is under lockdown. The mission isn't annoying however, because your attacks can't hurt him, at several points he stops while you take care of the enemies, and because the military is smart enough to realize that they should focus their attention on the big green monster trying to kill them, instead of the little man driving a car.
• In Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: Winter Assault, the penultimate Imperial Guard mission involves an escort mission. The thing is, you're escorting a Land Raider and a contingent of Ultramarines supporting it — although there's too much for it to handle by itself, it's far from helpless, and it can sometimes make it nearly halfway across the map without any player intervention before finally being destroyed.
• The Final Fantasy Legend's escort missions have, specifically, useful NPCs that completely help you through spells.
• Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy:
  • There's a mission where you and Kyle visit a hostile planet. Kyle ends up escorting you through most of it, as he can make short work of every enemy that shows up, even the newly-introduced, ultra-durable Hazard Troopers.
  • Jedi Academy also features one level where the player has to escort groups of prisoners, four at a time, through an arena that houses a Rancor. Fortunately, they all make a beeline for the exit and you've usually cleared a path for them already, so it boils down to your ability to keep the Rancor away. The difficulty here depends on your power set — if you have Mind Trick, you can keep said Rancor standing in place without bothering anyone for the entire level. Alternatively, you could take a DEMP 2 gun with you at the start of the level to keep it stunned in place although you have to be very conservative about your ammo for the latter.
• Syphon Filter Dark Mirror includes an escort mission involving an (initially) unarmed UN peacekeeper. If faced with enemies, he freezes in terror as they open fire. Happily, you can command him to hide or take cover, at which point they focus on you. (Who is heavily armed.)
• RuneScape has escorts in the Temple Trekking minigame. The hard ones are a pain, but the easy and medium, which do offer good rewards, can be enjoyable, and as the escortees level up, they can be pretty helpful. With the exception of snails, swamp snakes, and vampyres (which you need certain weapons to even hurt), they could probably do the trek themselves.
• While it's not really an "escort" mission because you don't have to take him anywhere, Archangel's/Garrus' recruitment mission in Mass Effect 2 involves Shepard & Co. infiltrating his base and making sure he survives the giant masses of mercenaries and freelancers all attempting to kill him, which involves leaving him at his sniper perch and sealing the base. He takes damage over time (like 20% of his health bar every minute or so), turning it into a Timed Mission with a Nonstandard Game Over at the end of it, but you can leave one of your two party members with him to slow this rate. Bizarrely, his AI actually seems more competent during this mission than when he's actually in your party: he doesn't run blindly into hordes of enemies with a sniper rifle, for one.
  • As to your business, at one point you have to reach a button on the other side of a flood of krogan, varren and vorcha. Depending on your playstyle, you might clear the room faster (and thus limit the damage to Garrus) if you have both squadmates at your side.
  • Another strange example comes at the end of the game at the Collector Base. In this section, you're required to follow your chosen biotic specialist across a long and largely exposed bridge. Despite this, in an odd subversion the specialist is escorting you at the same time; they protect you from being eaten by seeker swarms while you protect them from the hail of bullets and nasty aliens trying to do you all in. Unlike many, many other escort missions, this one isn't irritating, as the specialist has the good sense to take cover whenever the shooting starts, and only moves when you move. (They may also be invincible.) For an escort mission, it's a surprisingly enjoyable and atmospheric segment of the game.
    • At the end of that mission, the specialist can turn around and shoot a shockwave to clear the brunt of the pursuers, leaving only a few for Shepard to pick off at the end of the very satisfying cinematic.
  • Another example from the "Arrival" DLC. It's similar to the Archangel example above, but this time you have to protect Dr. Amanda Kenson while she hacks a security console. There's two main differences between the two missions: Dr. Kenson won't fight back, unlike Garrus, and you have to fight all of the enemies completely alone. Luckily, there aren't as many enemies to fight.
• The escort missions in Assassin's Creed II weren't too bad. Most of them allow Ezio to tell the escortees to stay put while he clears the way first. Even wet tissues like his mother and sister are surprisingly resilient and don't have to deal with direct threats for very long, and others like Lorenzo Di Medici are competent enough to defend themselves from attacks for a short while, helpfully flanking opponents so you can Back Stab. There are a handful of Leeroy Jenkins, notably Caternia Sforza from the Battle of Forli DLC, but as long as you've mastered the counterstrike, no escort mission should take you more than two attempts.
  • An intriguing one had you escorting a gondola through Venice, protecting it from archers. The gondola is an easy target, but every single one of the archers is close to the water, making disposing of them simple.
  • One of the online modes in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood has one team trying to kill a VIP, making this an Escort Mission for the other team. The longer the VIP survives, the more points the escorters get.
• Red Dead Redemption has a few escort missions (unsurprisingly since it's a Western and you're literally able to ride shotgun on stagecoaches or wagons.) For the most part, though, they're not that bad. Either the NPC you're defending has enough brains to stay back while you run ahead and clear the path, or they have sufficient durability to last more than one repeater hit. Or, especially when you're manning Gatling Guns on moving trains, you're given adequate firepower to do the job properly. They're done so nicely a couple of them double as Crowning Moments of Awesome.
• There are a couple of scenarios in the campaign setting of Warhammer 40,000: Rites Of War that require you to move a specific unit to a specific hex, and which you lose if the specific unit is killed, but the units in question are very powerful and are under your complete control, like any other unit, so the frustrating aspects of an escort mission are avoided.
• One of the missions in Homefront is to escort three fuel trucks that you've stolen from the North Koreans to the U.S Military. It's listed under exceptions because even though the fuel trucks can't defend themselves, you get a combat helicopter to protect them.
• Deus Ex presents the player with a number situations in which hostages, prisoners, or other NPCs need to be escorted to safety. However, not only does the game present you with the option to tell them, "Wait here while I clear a path," but failing to protect them does not result in losing the game in the strictest sense - certain plot elements may change, but the player is still allowed to advance.
• There is a grand total of one escort mission in Fallout: New Vegas, as part of an optional bit of Beyond the Beef. However, it differs from others because:
  • It's short. Less than a minute.
  • You encounter no enemies unless you take a very wrong path that is hard to find.
  • The person you're escorting will follow you closely. He is also pretty sturdy, and isn't bad in a fight.
• There's a mission in Wing Commander 2 where you have to escort a destroyer through several encounters with Kilrathi Grikath fighter-bombers. These are not infrequently the bane of the player's existence, but in this mission the destroyer being escorted is apt to take out more of them than the player. This is one of the less joystick-tossing escort missions.
• Final Fantasy Tactics Advance also have a few, but the difficulty isn't as high and they actually manage to be useful most of the time. Which is a good thing considering they always count towards your maximum party size.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics A2 has some, too, and while the characters aren't suicidal, they refuse to do anything but move, even if they happen to have a prototype über-sword and the enemy is standing right next to them and attacking every round. They also don't necessarily count towards your maximum party size.
• The old text-based The Hobbit computer game required Bilbo to ensure Thorin's survival (and for maximum points, Gandalf's) until everyone returned to Bilbo's cottage. Odd in that both characters are stronger and more capable than Bilbo, though frequently weaker than some of the more dangerous monsters. Fortunately, Thorin (who's critical to opening the side door to Smaug's lair) is programmed not to wander off the way Gandalf does—unless Bilbo is wearing the Ring, and thus invisible. Both characters are also prone to tell Bilbo "No" when asked to do important things like protect him from Orcs or help him out of a window he's too short to reach. Fortunately they don't attack powerful enemies much, but are often captured by both Orcs and elves and thus out of reach when needed.
• Parasite Eve 2 gives you Kyle, who is only armed with a pistol and has no special powers like Aya, but is an excellent shot and can help kill enemies fairly quickly. However, while he has good defense, he only has 100 HP and you can't use any healing spells or items on him at all, so if he gets killed, Game Over. There's one part at the start of disc 2 where Kyle gets mortally wounded and his HP is reduced to 5, making him a One-Hit-Point Wonder until the next cut scene forces him to flee.
  • There's another NPC towards the end of the game Aya has to protect, but thankfully, there are no monsters to protect the NPC from. However, the room the two are in is being filled with gas, which will sap the girl's HP over time if you take too long. Every time her HP drops, she coughs and stands still. It's also made more frustrating since she will refuse to move until you examine something she is looking at and you have to literally hold her hand by slowly walking to the elevator since running will not make her follow you.
• Allied characters in Second Sight know to take cover, often know how to handle a gun, and are generally fine with letting Vattic run ahead and take care of things himself. Missions when Vattic has access to psychic powers are even easier, since there's only one ally at a time and they can be healed.
• In L.A. Noire, the last Traffic Desk assignment ends with an escort mission. Luckily the person you are escorting has the common sense to stay in cover while you (and eventually your partner) fight the mooks through various stages.
• One mission in Guild Wars requires you escort a group of survivors during their escape from a hostile nation. The eight survivors will actively heal themselves and you, reducing the burden on your party, and only one of them needs to survive until the end.
• In the Saints Row series, a lot of missions are technically Escort mission since if your plot-critical homies die then the mission fails - however personnel can be revived after death instantly and without limit so long as 30 seconds have not passed since their death, and vehicular escorts are generally very durable.
• Bayonetta will occasionally have you protect the little girl Cereza. These missions, however, are usually very short and Cereza's health goes down very slowly. It even regenerates! The enemy angels not even aiming for Cereza doesn't hurt either.
• Bayonetta 2, in a similar vein to its predecessor, will occasionally have you protect the little boy Loki. This isn't often, however, and when you do, Loki proves that he's more than capable of taking care of himself, thank you very much. He'll fight the angels alongside you and can dodge like Bayonetta can. The only downside of this is that his health doesn't regenerate like Cereza's did.
• The Last of Us has you accompanied by a young girl named Ellie throughout most of the campaign, and unlike other Tagalong Kids, she happily and helpfully assists you by distracting mooks and getting in and out of cover without being prompted. She also recognizes your play style and reacts accordingly; she'll gracefully avoid conflict and stay out of sight if you chose to be stealthy, but she also assists with combat, providing supporting fire and incapacitating enemies that you're struggling against in melee combat. This also goes for other allies you meet throughout the game. She's also absolutely necessary to get past some of the obstacles.
• A manageable example in one of the early levels of Ogre Battle 64 where you have to escort Prince Yumil. Yumil himself can't fight, but he's got four black knights with him that are WAY stronger than anything you'll face on the map and anything you have access to for a decent portion of the game. While the black knights aren't invincible, the only way Yumil will die is if you ignore him and let him wander into repeated fights, which you shouldn't do anyways because it means no experience for your troops and Yumil leaves the next mission.
• Might and Magic VII has an (obligatory) quest where you have to rescue seven petrified dwarves from the Red Dwarf Mines and escort them to their king in Stone City. Since the dwarves can't be killed (they don't even have sprites once they're un-petrified) and don't say anything after their being-freed comments unless you choose to talk to them, the escort part is no more of a hassle than getting from the Red Dwarf Mines to Stone City would be without someone to escort. In the same game, if you take the first Wizard Promotion Quest (not required, but recommended) where you have to build a Golem, the Quest Giver has a Golem go with you to help. Unfortunately, he doesn't do much, but when you find all six Golem parts, you have to talk to him to complete the quest.
• In Sniper Elite V2: At one point during the misson "Opernplatz," you have to save a defecting German scientist from execution, and cover him from your location so he can escape to where you are, by sniping every enemy (who are all unaware of you at the moment, by the way) between him and you. He's got a gun of his own, uses it fairly well, and knows when to take cover. It's surprisingly fun.
• In Gun, there is the mission where you have to protect the Coolies (Asian laborers) from Apaches while they build a bridge. However, the Coolies are all armed, you have an additional posse of men from town backing you up, and nothing happens even if all the Coolies die. It's actually a ton of fun.
• Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon: There are 4 levels in which you need to escort Toads to Pixelator screens. Each Toad has a phobia, and will refuse to go near certain things. The first one dislikes water, the second one is afraid of clocks/giant gears, the third one doesn't step on cracked ice, and the last ones (the final escort has you taking care of two toads at once) won't go near carnivorous plants, which any human being with a bit of sense would avoid. What stops their levels form being annoying is that a) They stay away from ghosts when you engage them (Ghosts will still use them as shields sometimes), b) They can get items for you, including gems and a clock rotor,(needed to open a door leading to the boss fight) and c) You can suck them with the Poltergust, allowing you to carry them over their fears and even use them as projectiles.
• DuckTales Remastered inverts this with Bubba Duck and Gizmoduck joining Scrooge McDuck, the former to destroy icy blockades in the way, and the latter to break a tough barrier. They're both invincible and smash/rocket enemies in their way with much ease, making it a rare case of the NPCs escorting the player.
• Almost all of ICO is an escort mission, requiring the player to escort a mysterious girl around a giant castle, with the game ending if she's captured by the various shadows that attack you. Fortunately, her AI is fairly competent (the player can even just grab her by the hand and pull her along with them,) there's a practical reason for keeping her around (her presence removes various barriers that the player can't get past otherwise) and the game actually does a good job of endearing her to the player.
• In Toy Story, Woody has to help Rex escape from Andy's room after the toys get angry at Woody for knocking Buzz out the window. While Rex is able to get through the buckets that Woody can't, he can't get past the piles of blocks, which Woody has to knock away with his pull-string. Fortunately, Rex is invincible.
• Most escort missions in the Geneforge series involves escorting safely off the map, and it's easy enough to clear the map beforehand, or tell the escorts to wait until you do so. Then all you need to get the credit is to be in range when each one walks off the edge of the map.
• One scenario in Shining Force III has the player guiding a family of peasants away from the clutches of an enemy infantry. Not only is the player in complete control of the peasants, but the setup^note In which the player would have to maneuver their units in accordance to the trains provides a genuine challenge without resorting to Fake Difficulty.
• Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi: The process of getting each family member back to the Sanctuary. Luckily, it's nowhere near as bad as other examples, since they're fast, fairly smart, and can defend themselves to a limited degree, and you never have to take them TOO far.
• FTL: Faster Than Light has some quests where you must transport an NPC ship or character to a marked "Quest" beacon. Fortunately, the escortee has no bearing on your ship's performance, and you can even ditch the quest with no penalty by simply jumping to the next sector.
• Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages has a few missions where your objective is to keep someone alive, but in each case the escortee is well-armed and is pretty good at defending themselves.
• The Doom Eye boss battle in Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals. The Doom Eye's beam focuses on Prince Alex, who is being protected by Iris's magical shield. She can soak up a lot of damage, but if she falls, it's Game Over. Thankfully, you can block the beam with your own body (and there's an energy core in the arena that creates a shield around you when carried)—Idura points this out for you before the battle starts.
  • There's several other instances where the hero(es) must fend off monsters threatening friendly NPCs. Fortunately, the NPCs can't be harmed.
• Save for the missions mentioned above, the rest of the escorts in Far Cry 3 are typically quite merciful and well done, with your escortees being fairly intelligent in that they actively seek cover, move cautiously, and can defend themselves. Even Oliver, the group's stoner friend who should be a pain to defend as you have to do so with a sniper rifle from a water tower, will snag the AK-47 from the first guard you drop and use it to defend himself quite well.
• The first level of Medal of Honor: Underground was quite possibly the most tolerable Escort Mission in existence. You play as French resistance fighter and Action Girl Manon Baptiste, joining your brother Jacques on a mission to break into a German weapons supply depot and steal a truck full of weapons. The problem is, the city of Paris is swarming with pro-Nazi Milice. Fortunately, Jacques is a badass. He'll run through the streets, shrugging off bullets and adding impromptu sunroofs to the braincases of one Milice goon after another with his hefty SMG, and only requires any of your help when he's picking a locked door and can't defend himself. Unfortunately, he dies at the end of the level when the truck is caught in an ambush.
• At one point of VVVVVV, you have to escort a fellow crew member through a level. While you're on the ground, the crewmate will run to be under you, wherever you are, but he won't move while you're on the ceiling. It's quite hard to do, but then again, so is the rest of the game.
• In Warzone 2100's Beta Campaign there is a sort of reverse escort mission where you have to prevent the Collective's Commander from escaping from the ports where he starts at to the opposite edge of the map. The AI has a convoy of heavy units to escort him, an elaborate and well-defended fortress which he can retreat to, and strong air cover from a squadron of VTOL strike fighters. But the Collective Commander is a complete moron who panics at the first hint of trouble and clumsily rams into buildings and defensive structures that were meant to protect him, getting stuck and getting killed. As of the latest release, his air cover and fortress are the only things that can really save him from himself.
• From the Wolfenstein series:
  • Return to Castle Wolfenstein features a sub-mission where you must escort a scientist to safety, as part of a bigger mission which even has you escorting a tank.
  • Wolfenstein (2009) features a subversion: sometimes you come across prisoners whom you need to free. However, freeing the prisoners involves simply untying them; they then tell you that they'll find their own way to safety from there.
• Happens in Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner. Con: You have to protect a soldier's mech, meant to help out in a battle later, that for whatever stupid reason, can't fight back, on top on YOU having carry it all the way to its destination. Pro: You can heal said mech by carrying it, making said mission a cakewalk, on top of being able to swing him like a bat and even FLING him at your enemies. FUN.

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Non-Video Game Examples

Anime & Manga

• Attack on Titan: One starts in Episode 11 to take back Trost. The escortee in question is Eren in titan form, who is carrying a ginormous boulder that needs to be used to plug the breach in Wall Rose, with our heroes having to protect him through titan-infested territory long enough for him to do so.
• In Naruto, Team 7's first C-rank mission is to escort a bridge builder named Tazuna to his home in the Land of Waves so he can finish a bridge that will greatly boost the economy. Too bad he kinda-sorta-didn't bother to mention the crime lord trying to off him, or he might have gotten more appropriate bodyguards than three green Kid Heroes and a single Badass Teacher; due to the Land of Waves' poor economy, he could only afford a C-rank mission.
• For most of Ninja Scroll: The Series, Jubei's main job is protecting Shigure on their journey. She's pretty useless in a fight, but it doesn't matter because the attackers aren't too good either.
• In episode 10 of The Pilot's Love Song, the surviving students are given a Suicide Mission to protect a spotter plane from the incoming enemy fleet. Unfortunately, they had just barely survived through a previous vicious encounter in episodes 7 and 8, and aren't too eager to go. Even their instructors attempt to stop them from getting deployed, with one attacking the mechanics pulling out their plane, while another pulls her military insignian off and tells them to seek shelter instead. Unfortunately for the girls associated with them, several of the boys volunteer for it for a variety of reasons. They ultimately fail, and the spotter plane is shot down near the end of the episode.
• In SPY×FAMILY, Yor, a master assassin, is given a mission to protect the daughter and infant grandson of a murdered underworld boss on their voyage to find asylum in a foreign country. This is complicated by Loid and Anya winning tickets on the same cruise. Not only does Yor have to fend off dozens of hitmen, she also has to keep her husband and daughter from finding out she's an assassin (Anya already knows through her telepathy, but is a Secret Secret-Keeper for Yor).
• In episode 2 of Stella Women’s Academy, High School Division Class C³, Yura is assigned as a guard for the C3's club president Sonora. The latter makes the game more interesting by handicapping herself by not using an airsoft gun while Yura protects her. If they make it out of the building without Sonora getting hit or Yura defeating all the other girls, they wouldn't force her to join the club. However, if they do hit her, then Yura would have to join, and they would make Sonora clean the guns in a swimsuit as punishment. Although with Sonora's help, Yura does win, she decides to join their club afterwards after seeing how much fun they had together.
• At the start of Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee, Gauche Suede finds the protagonist, Lag Seeing, in the ruins of his home. Lag has an address slip on his arm designating him as a Human Mail bound for Cambel Litus, where his aunt lives, so Gauche, as a Letter Bee, is tasked with escorting Lag across the Gaichuu-infested wasteland to reach that town.

Comic Books

• The Legend of Wonder Woman (2016): Lt. Steve Trevor and Lt. Lawrence Stone are each USAAF fighter pilots from separate squadrons for whom escort missions are their missions. Only one such mission is shown, one in which they fail due to the Duke of Deception figuring out how to use his necromancy to tear paneling off of planes in flight.
• Godzilla Aftershock: Tarkan Çavusgolu, a one-time character of this MonsterVerse graphic novel, is a member of Monarch's crisis response unit who is assigned to protect Emma Russell during her trek around the world investigating the MUTO Prime's origins and how to stop it. His services are certainly needed due to Emma's Fearless Fool tendencies during her work.

Fan Works

• The first installment in The Changeling Sequence has Jason stranded in Eastern Europe with his younger brother Damian and trying to get both of them back to Gotham in America. Oh, and they must absolutely be stealthy about it or terrorist mastermind Ra's al Ghul (who's also Damian's grandpa) will snoop down and abduct them.
• In the Discworld, bodyguarding is a legitimate means for an Assassin to earn a contract fee, bringing about the complete opposite of the usual agreement, in that this time the client remains alive and well. However stupid the client is and however unwilling they are to adapt to local conditions in Ankh-Morpork, the Assassin contracted to bodyguard must ward off all threats to their life. This requires diplomacy, patience, and when all else fails, applied violence. An Assassin risks her life protecting an idiot in murder Most Orrible'. She does advise the Thieves' Guild, who her client has mortally offended, that if they ever see him on the street without Assassin protection, he's all theirs for any retributive violence they deem necessary...
• Not the intended use (Zantetsuken Reverse): Chapter 4, in an author's note, talks about helping a twelve-year-old through a dark magic castle:
  I do admit that I did end up downplaying Maria's achievements. I say that Richter was the one who killed Dracula, so that does take Maria's cred down a notch. Having her travel with Richter insinuates that he protected her… but also insinuates that he couldn't have made it without her. But really, surviving a hell castle at the age of freaking twelve does warrant some acknowledgement. Even if she was protected… Escort Missions, anyone?
• Inverted in With Strings Attached during the quest for the third piece of the Vasyn, where the Hunter has to escort the four across a lot of dangerous territory to get them to the Twisted Temple. He is underwhelmed by their appearance (and they “live down” to it) and is sure they'll get themselves killed at the first opportunity. For their part, they detest him, and the trip quickly turns into a pissing contest. And then it turns into something else entirely....

Films — Live-Action

• Executive Decision is essentially an Escort Mission in which the commando team has to escort Cahill and Matheny onto the plane to defuse the bomb.
• Being a First-Person Shooter in film form, of course Hardcore Henry sees fit to have an escort mission during the story. It involves Henry and Jimmy's legion of clones guiding Jimmy himself — the original, crippled scientist — to Akan's headquarters, as he is totally defenseless while commanding his clones.
• In The Matrix Reloaded, Morpheus and Trinity become involved in a high-speed chase across the freeway as they attempt to escape with the Keymaker.
• One Shot is about Jake Harris trying to escort a prisoner from a CIA black site to prevent a massive attack on Washington, D.C. when terrorists take over the base.
• In Prairie Fever, Preston's assignment is to take the three Mail Order Brides suffering from 'prairie fever' from the small frontier town of Clearwater to the railhead at Carson City where they can be put on a train and sent back east. Needless to say, things do not go smooth.
• In Red Tails, Colonel Bullard lays it down for his men when they protest their restrictive orders to stay with the heavies if the enemy fighters try to flee. It's also based on the Real Life exploits of the Tuskeegee Airmen, an all-black squadron of American fighter pilots in World War II who were tasked with protecting American bombers from the Luftwaffe at all costs.
  Colonel Bullard: We count our victories by the bombers we get to their targets, by the husbands we return to their wives, by the fathers we give back to their children. To the last minute, to the last man, we fight. We fight!
• The movie Tears of the Sun is about a Navy SEAL team's mission to escort an American doctor out of a war-ravaged African nation. Ultimately the team ends up escorting a large group of refugees as well, in contradiction to their orders to only bring the doctor out.
• Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen: The Game has several Escort Missions. Thankfully, the NPCs shoot at the enemy, they stay out of your line of fire, and are generally helpful. The only downside is that it's sometimes hard to keep up with them, since they like to charge ahead of you. A lot.
• The Viral Factor opens with one such mission, where the hero Man Jon and his team needs to escort a Kidnapped Scientist and his family out of insurgent territory in Jordan. Due to Man Jon's superior, Sean, being a traitor, the team instead heads right into an insurgent ambush with everyone save for Man Jon killed; turns out Sean is after a virus sample the scientist is carrying to sell it to international terrorists.

Live-Action TV

• Game of Thrones: The climactic scene of "The Door" turns into the non-video game version of this: protect and evacuate a comatose Bran while all of the Three-Eyed Raven's knowledge "uploads" to him, with the Army of the Dead hot on their tail looking for Bran's head.
• Kamen Rider Ex-Aid spends most of its last third on an extended escort mission, as the Riders themselves can't stop the Deadly Game Kamen Rider Chronicle and instead need to escort Nico, one of the players, through killing all of the bosses. Nico is generally competent and powerful enough to land the finishing blow herself, but needs assistance with wearing down the monsters due to her Ride Player powers being far weaker than an actual Rider's and the game being so difficult as to be essentially unwinnable.
• In the second season The Librarians episode "And the Point of Salvation", sees Ezekiel Jones end up in one of these via a magical item taking over a computer and calling out many video game tropes by name. As soon as Jacob finds out that it's that kind of level, he tells Ezekiel he doesn't envy him. The Too Dumb to Live is subverted, though, as all the others have to spend countless resets teaching Ezekiel how to bypass certain points. He might be great at stealing, but he knows nothing about pipes (Jacob), detecting patterns (Cassandra), or fighting (Eve). Still, despite it all being a video game, his friends are dying for real, so after dozens (if not hundreds) of resets, Ezekiel is a nervous wreck. Then he ends up performing a Heroic Sacrifice in order for the others to get to the next savepoint. Cassandra manages to restore a backup version of him, but this version hasn't lived through this "game", erasing all Character Development for him.
• One of the most famous and best-known examples worldwide of an escort mission isn't in a video game at all - it's on, of all things, The Price Is Right. The goal of the Cliff Hangar pricing game is to prevent a hiker from falling off a cliff - the disparity between the actual price and the contestant's guess inches the poor guy that much closer to doom.

Literature

• Avalanche Express by Colin Forbes involves Western intelligence escorting a defecting Soviet general across Europe on the Orient Express. At the same time, the Soviet wartime sabotage network along the route is activated to stop him.
• Deadhouse Gates: During a continent wide rebellion, Fist Coltaine is forced to protect a horde of refugees of 50,000 across half the continent while everyone on it tries murdering their way through the thin line of soldiers to kill them. He succeeds in getting 30,000 to safety at the cost of his entire army.
• Earth Unaware featured one of these as part of the pre-screening process for potential MOPS recruits. Captain Wit O'Toole played the part of a diplomat that a group of SAS troopers interested in joining MOPS had to escort to a safehouse. Mazer Rackham surprises everyone by giving O'Toole his gun instead of treating him as The Load.
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has this for Chapter 4, where an entourage of members of the Order of the Phoenix escort Harry from Privet Drive to a safehouse (the Burrow) before the charm protecting him breaks. To this end, half the party take polyjuice potion to resemble him.
• Many of The Lord of the Rings examples in the games listed above were of course inspired by the original plot of The Lord of the Rings, which was essentially a giant Escort Mission to get Frodo and the Ring to Mt. Doom to destroy it. Subverted in that Frodo's escorts, except Sam, go off and do something else at the end of the first book, but Frodo still makes it.
• Shannara:
  • Unsurprisingly, given the previous example, The Sword of Shannara was also one big Escort Mission, this time to get Shea Ohmsford to Paranor to get the eponymous sword, and then to get him to the Warlock Lord Brona's lair to use the sword to kill Brona. Again, he loses his escort right before getting to Paranor, but then acquires a new one in the form of Panamon Creel and Keltset.
  • The first sequel to The Sword of Shannara, The Elfstones of Shannara, was also an escort mission: Wil Ohmsford had to get Amberle Elessedil to the Bloodfire and back again.
  • The next book in the series, The Wishsong of Shannara, consists of two escort missions. Allanon and Rone Leah have to escort Brin Ohmsford to the Maelmord to destroy the Ildatch, while Slanter, Garet Jax, Edain Elessedil, Elb Foraker, and Helt have to escort Jair Ohmsford to Heaven's Well to heal the Silver River and save Brin. Considering that, at the end of the book, only the Ohmsford siblings, Rone, and Slanter are still alive, this one was a real bloodbath.
  • The follow-up series, The Heritage of Shannara, had at least one of these also: the plot of The Druid Of Shannara was essentially an escort mission in which Walker Boh, Morgan Leah, Pe Ell, and Horner Dees had to escort Quickening to Eldwist, lair of the Stone King. A little different in that, once there, they also had to find a way to defeat the Stone King. To put it bluntly, Terry Brooks really liked this plot.
  • The Elf Queen of Shannara features two of these. Escorting Wren into Arborlon, and then escorting Arborlon off the island.
• The Witch of Knightcharm: The protagonist Emily attempts to infiltrate an evil Wizarding School, which requires her to race several other students through a lethal obstacle course in order to complete orientation and become fully enrolled in the school. Another student named Lauren, who has fashioned herself as a sort of Trickster Mentor to Emily, turns the race into this trope for Emily by arranging for a very weak student named Janet Yawkly to also run in Emily's heat. Emily knows that Yawkly isn't strong enough to protect herself and will likely be attacked by the other girls in her heat, so Emily has to both complete the course herself while also keeping Yawkly alive.

Tabletop Games

• The Dark Heresy core rulebook includes a mission for escorting an inquisitorial agent to the blessing of a temple. He is painfully unconcerned by the omens that things are about to go very badly. When he finally realizes something's wrong, he blames an innocent party and sends the Player Characters on a wild goose chase to arrest said party.
• Subverted in the Tabletop RPG Paranoia adventure Me and My Shadow, Mark IV, where the players have to escort an enormous cybernetic combat tank. The problem the players face is not so much to protect Mark IV as to keep themselves from being crushed between various potent assaults and Mark IV's Nigh-Invulnerability.
• The Pathfinder scenario "Night March of Kalkamedes" is one of these, the twist being that the escorted person is a sleepwalker, and the PCs are trying to find out where he is trying to get to during his nightly walks.
• In the Shadowrun game for the Sega Genesis, the client you escort won't even be attacked by enemies, they go after you instead. These missions were near identical to carry a package missions except that they can get caught up in area of effect attacks like grenades or explosive fireballs.
• In the board game Unicornus Knights, Princess Cornelia rides off to take back her kingdom from an evil Emperor. The players play her advisors and knights, frantically trying to take down all the serious threats in her path before she gets herself killed.
• The Final Girl expansion The Haunting of Creech Manor uses this as a twist on the game's usual formula. The Killer, the Poltergeist, is completely invulnerable; instead, to win, you must search the mansion for a little girl named Carolyn (mechanically she's an item card) and get out of the building with her. Because, again, Carolyn is mechanically an item, she can't be harmed by the Poltergeist or its minions, but she can be yanked out of your possession and put back in the item decks. The Epic Dark Power "Forgetting Something?" makes it harder - now Carolyn won't leave the house unless you also have her stuffed bunny Mr. Floppy.

Webcomics

• In Darths & Droids, the Rogue One campaign nearly turns into one of these when the party gets saddled with Jyn Erso/Bria Tharen, a useless GMPC who keeps getting in their way and making things more difficult. Fortunately for all, Jim's character (a worthless load himself) gets killed and he takes over as Jyn/Bria, saving the campaign from being a giant escort mission.
• Iron Crown starts as an extended one. Isandar, a mercenary commander, gets hired to rescue our protagonist from the collapsing country her father ruled. Shenanigans ensue with a Deal with the Devil that complicates said straightforward escort.
• In The Noob, Sir Bob and Ohforf'Sake encounter one before Bob can warn his companion to avoid it.
• In Tower of God, in the Hell Train, one of the contests between Bam's and Hoaqin's team is for the first to escort a flying fish safely through a complicated stage while the latter tries to kill it.

Web Original

• Two Best Friends Funtime Adventures: "Escort Service" involves Pat complaining that escort missions in games are always painful and annoying. At the end, he and Matt leave to get ice cream. Matt starts acting Too Dumb to Live, just like the escort mission characters Pat had just been complaining about.
• Noob has the titular guild doing such a mission in Season 2. The charges are Insufferable Genius alchemists that keep complaining about their escort's idiocy and slow pace. The guild's Blood Knight Honorary True Companion had failed the mission several times before they came to help because she had killed the charges herself out of annoyance.
• The Web Video Every Video Game Escort Mission Ever the hero complains about this quite vocally when he finds himself being asked by a dying Secret Serviceman to escort the presidents daughter, who has learning difficulties and hates guns, out of a zombie infested building.

Western Animation

• The Eek! The Cat SNES video game is a Puzzle Platformer made of Escort Missions. That's right. Every single level in this game revolves around Eek having to escort some blind or dizzy moron, making sure they reach the exit. Thankfully, Eek can't die, but his rescuees do not have the same luck.

Real Life

• As anyone who has ever tried to lead someone to a destination that doesn't know the way can attest to, this is extremely difficult. They will lose track of you in traffic easily, get stuck behind a red light when you went through the green, and immediately get lost if they lose sight of you. This is especially difficult in an unfamiliar city — the leader may not know the red light timings or traffic patterns to mitigate this. In the modern day this isn't how people get to a new destination thanks to smartphones, GPS, and electronic navigation aids, but in the time before cell phones and civilian GPS with any degree of accuracy, this was a major challenge. Even many maps were no help because they weren't detailed enough to show how to actually reach the destination.
• Flaggers for oversize loads. Oversize loads are trucks that are hauling loads that are beyond the maximum allowable size for a solo trucker to deliver. They often include windmill blades, construction equipment, farm equipment, double-wide trailers, military equipment, and airplane or ship components. For safety, they have flaggers, ordinary civilian vehicles with flags and banners warning of the oversize load, so that civilian drivers can be aware of the oversize load from a long distance and can avoid it.
  • Oversize loads, due to their physical and legal limitations, can be extremely difficult to escort as a flagger. Oversize loads are heavily limited on what they can do. They're often too tall to enter many tunnels or go under overpasses. Some are too long to make turns on surface streets in cities or suburbs. Some are too heavy to drive on most bridges. They also break down much more often and require refueling more often than normal loads. Many cities and states have laws that restrict the speed of oversize loads below the speed limit for civilian cars, and curves in the road are much harder for oversize loads to navigate without tipping over or crashing.
  • Additionally, civilian vehicles tend to cause all sorts of problems for oversize loads by not understanding their limitations. Drivers will pass turning trucks on the right, swerve in and out of the convoy, or cut off the load in traffic and suddenly brake. They will get too close to the back end of the load, not expecting the load to need to back to be able to negotiate a turn on city surface streets, or in some cases simply rear end the slow moving load at high speed.

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