RPG Features Nobody Asked For – YouTube
He then turns to the notorious “they’ll follow you” NPC — in other words, escort missions — and his criticism is familiar. Cain highlights the many frustrations of these sequences: companions getting stuck, awkward pathing, and having plot-critical exposition dumped on you while you’re trying to shepherd someone to safety.
“You can never stay perfectly aligned with them — you’re constantly sprinting ahead or lagging behind,” he says. “I encounter this so often that it’s hard to believe a designer hasn’t been annoyed by escort quests. Either they’ve never played an RPG, or they thought, ‘This escort mission will be fun.’ They’re usually wrong.”
His suggested fix is simple: put the player in control of a vehicle. Let them drive or pilot the partner instead — giving the player agency over movement makes the sequence far less tedious. He returns to the problem of NPCs who exist only to unload exposition: the characters who “talk at you” instead of engaging in meaningful dialogue.
“Make those conversations long and unskippable and you create a lore-dump nightmare,” he explains, naming both exposition-heavy NPCs and lecturing characters as culprits. The remedy isn’t new: offer optional delivery methods such as audio logs, codex entries, or in-game texts so players can consume lore at their own pace.
All sound advice, though I have one exception: not all escort sequences are irredeemable — Resident Evil 4’s escort sections remain the gold standard. If your game includes an escort segment, ask whether it lives up to Resi 4’s design; if it doesn’t, you should probably rethink it.
Fallout co-creator Tim Cain recalls buying Super Nintendo games for $59 in the ’90s, and notes that although digital distribution reduced publishers’ costs, those savings weren’t passed on to players.
Source: gamesradar.com
