alt Hacker News> As a result, the game offers no easy satisfaction of hacking and slashing through weaker opponents.
Besides the questionable morality of kill=experience=progress in typical hack'n'slash or roguelike, what started to irritate me in there as I grew older as well, was the stupid mechanics where crowds of enemies described as intelligent humanoids (i.e. not animals or robots) facing clearly overpowered high-level PC (famous, even) never surrendered, almost never tried to flee, attacked one-by-one, and shoved no sign of tactical thinking or self-preservation instinct. Despite being armed and (by description) organised, PC could enter a narrow corridor, defeat dozen of them without taking any damage, yet there will be a waiting line eager for demise by a single hit -- even actively advancing towards it. No attempt to regroup, to take advantage of the number superiority, wait in open space, ambush from all directions, or anything like that. Same applies to most FPS: there is a Doomguy running around at unprecedented pace, slaughtering everything that moves, but we will all keep our scattered positions. (This led me to a thought, whether it would be possible to rearrange enemies in canonical Doom map so that all would attack at once at some appropriate spot and whether it would guarantee their victory or not.)
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This is, IMO something that has infected modern mainstream TTRPG: Monsters hardly run away, even if a fireball just killed half of you. One thing B/X AD&D got right were the heavy use of Moral Checks, e.g. Check their morale on first death in enemy party, when half have died, etc. In fact, fighting is deadly and scary. And these morale checks differentiated undead as that enemy that knows no fear and had no morale checks, unless forced upon them by a Cleric's Turn Undead.
IIRC the “Fallen” in Diablo 2 would sometimes run away. This is sort of funny because they actually did have a type of guy that could revive them.
I think the Grunts in Halo would run too.
Mostly it seems to be treated as a gimmick or joke in FPS and RPG. Individual enemy AI is usually pretty bad in these genres, so they probably just don’t have the capacity to act smart enough to act scared.
Of course, it’s a main feature in some tactical games, like the Total War series. That’s more of an explicit mechanic though.
Game developers (mostly... hopefully?) try to optimize for the "fun" aspect of a game, not the "realism of the flight/flight instinct" aspect
It sounds like you might be interested in the idea of a PvP multiplayer game. I've never found myself concerned with the morality of camping/flanking/wiping an entire squad in BF6 without mercy because I know they urgently wish to do the exact same thing to me.
>CalebCity: “How fearless minions are in ANY video game”
That's because the only thing that became "realistic" were the graphics. People don't really want realism anywhere else, because realism means infinite complexity. They just want to hack'n'slash.
The monsters running away when wounded is a basic element in the Monster Hunter games, which are still very unique in how they present the relationship between the player character and the world.
There's a mod for Battletech (the video game) where people act realistically and it is catastrophically boring. The second you get sufficient advantage over an enemy they panic and promptly eject to save themselves at the cost of their company's mech. Yes, yes, it's what you would do, but it means I only fight 50% of the enemy.
The solution for your problem is playing a Souls game
While I agree it's incredibly jarring in some games, I'm always thinking back at a presentation by David Rosen on procedural animation: "First, do no harm to the gameplay". He's talking about animations in particular, but I feel that should be a core pillar for any game designer.
Many things are unnatural in games: you don't instantly recover from a beating by eating one apple in real life, but we're ok with it in games because it makes the gameplay fun.
https://youtu.be/LNidsMesxSE?si=fGFCTCHm77OJiYu3&t=260