Ask Lemmy

And their speed is faster than your walk/crouch but slower than your run forcing you to stop and go every 3 seconds or they mentally implode if you're too far away.

I can think of one counter example: In Death Trash, there's an escort quest, where you have to guide a blind guy with a shot gun through some kind of factory. He's as much of a liability is the devs could make him, running in and shooting blindly in all directions as soon as a combat encounter starts. It kinda turns the whole thing into a mission where the challenge is to defeat the enemies before the person you're escorting gets a chance to kill you both. (I guess that's what all the bad escort missions also boil down to, but in this case it's very explicit, which makes it funny.) They also kept it quite short and do it only once, so it works out. Still, it's the only escort quest I've ever done, that I've actually liked.

When BioShock Infinite came out, I thought, "oh, I'm so glad the industry finally figured escort missions out and we won't have problems with it anymore."

And yet.

Yep, I can't remember the game anymore, but was super excited to be playing it as a sequel, then came upon the first escort mission... I immediatly turned the game off, and never played it again. Nothing enrages me more than artifically wasting my time/difficulty because the dev's can't design a mission properly without using such a shitty crutch..