Devs, please improve the escort quests.

Okay, I know very well I'm not the first to bring this up, but the escort quests in this game are absolutely terrible, even for escort quests. Why?

1. The quests almost always take you to the opposite side of the planet, likely to somehwere you've already been.
2. The escort npcs are super slow, and take forever to realize they should teleport to you.
3. The escort npcs, despite the fact that AI for it is in the game, have no sense of self preservation, and will promptly run directly into all forms of danger.
4. Until you are fairly into the game, you have no real way of keeping them alive, largely due to the fact that staves with a healing effect are realtively rare.
5. These quests seemingly make up between a third and half of all quests on average in any given village, meaning there is little room for the game's other procedural quest content.

Now, I'm not just going to complain and move on, as there are many ways to remedy this. You could possibly;

• Give the escort npcs the AI to properly avoid danger and teleport to the player more often.
• Make the escort npcs far more resilient than they already are, to the point of you having to genuinely ignore them in order to fail the mission, or
• Simply make it just a rescue mission, where they promptly beam to the questgiver after being saved, circumventing the entire issue.

 

I ignore escorts 100% of the time and they still manage to survive about twice as often as not.

If you race ahead of them they have to keep teleporting and don't have a lot of time to be hurt.

 

never had issues, especially since tagets spawn in the same places most of the time. So when you make a planet with residents just pave the way to the escort location and you can speed over there.

 

Flags are super-useful for this. If rescue NPCs spawn in a certain dungeon a lot, plop a Flag down real close to cut out the trip to. Then yeah, make a tunnel back, blocking off any natural side-tunnels in your path. Altering the landscape reduces/eliminates monster spawns, and being underground eliminates birds from the equation.