Escort Mission

Escort Mission is an objective structure where the player's job is to keep an AI-controlled companion alive while it moves through hostile space, and its reputation as one of gaming's most reviled tropes comes from a mismatch built into the premise: the player's own competence at staying alive doesn't transfer to a companion whose movement, pathing, and threat awareness the player doesn't fully control. A death caused by the escortee wandering into a sightline or getting stuck behind cover feels unearned in a way a player's own mistake never does — the inverse of the legibility principle Soulslike design depends on, where every failure has to be traceable to a decision the player actually made.

Resident Evil 4's Ashley is the trope's most cited example: an escortee who can be grabbed, who blocks doorways, and whose AI pathing regularly produces exactly the failure the mission is nominally about preventing. The design lesson most later games drew wasn't to abandon the structure but to change its stakes: BioShock Infinite's Elizabeth is immortal by design, unable to be attacked at all, which keeps the fiction of a companion in danger without ever actually delegating a fail state to an AI the player can't steer.

Escort missions sit close to Companion AI generally but occupy its harshest end: a combat companion is usually tuned to disappear as a liability entirely, while an escort companion's vulnerability is the whole point of the mission, which means every flaw in its pathing and threat-awareness is directly exposed to the player rather than quietly hidden behind invincibility, the way most well-liked companions manage it.