Because babysitting in reality is so much fun that they just had to make a mission out of it, right? The escort mission has been realised properly on only a handful of occasions, in every other circumstance it has been the cause of untold levels of frustration. Escorting an NPC who stumbles through the world like a blind turkey is a gamer's worst nightmare: they die from nominal damage, run into enemies, block your line of sight and offer you nothing but grief in return. This is exacerbated by those stingy developers who gleefully starve players of checkpoints, forcing you to relive the agony repeatedly before finding success. The escort mission also provides players with a veritable smorgasbord of gaming tropes ranging from the dastardly health bar to the surreptitious path that our NPC adopts all of these are of course intended to make our combined experience as negative as possible. On occasion these missions are so shoddily thrown together that their completion can only ever be attributed to luck.
