> 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.)
It's hard to make enemies behave realistically because people will quickly catch on their patterns.
Fallout 76 mobs, for example, make use of line of sight harder than other Bethesda games. They won't spawn where the players are looking, and prefer to spawn at their backs to get a free cheap shot and stagger. With enough players looking everywhere, they might be forced to spawn visibly, but near an object they can use as cover. Also, they have a sixth sense that makes them walk towards a cover if you aim your weapon at them from afar while hidden.
It's also notable that a near-death enemy will sometimes flee out of your reach to regen health, and attack you again when it's healthy enough. They will also flee/cover if they're a melee type and you climb where they can't reach you, waiting for you to climb down.
I guess the idea was making them realistic, but sometimes this behavior devolves into hide and seek, which can become frustrating as they can use ridiculous things as cover, like chain link fences, floor grills, or a sapling.
I have enough realism IRL, I prefer games that prioritize entertaining mechanics rather than frustrating realism.
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
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.
I wonder, could Morale checks have been inherited from Chainmail? I could see them coming from a wargame…
I believe it did, actually. Morale checks are pretty common in war games.
I'd fix my typos and spelling now that I have my coffee, but it will not let me.
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
Sure, but I don't think they must be mutually exclusive; on the contrary: in the late stages when your character is a tank, swarms of minions that posed a challenge in early stages become just a nuisance, mostly. You are walking legend slaying dragons for breakfast, everybody and their dog knows about your invincibility … but instead of giving you some respect, they try to bite your heels on the first sight. I guess the "fun aspect" of seeing them flee and not restraining your movement at all could be slightly more satisfying than taking them down in a single hit one-by-one for the thousand time.
Other than the meta-answer that the game designers made it that way, or that you may need to farm kills for something in future, there is also the Zerg Rush answer: some creatures are literally bred to swarm their enemies, that's how the hive has always survived before. It doesn't matter how outmatched they are, provided every needling damages you at least a little bit.
It's not unknown in human warfare either:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_wave_attack#Use
There's a similar human need to protect what is precious. Defending your family, defending your motherland. Cities being seiged by a superior opponent don't just abandon the city in cowardice, because they know the opponent will just gain ground and still come after them. They don't want to, they'd rather you stopped, but they have to defend their territories, even if it means their annihilation. If you win, everyone gets killed, ravaged, enslaved, ... If they only have sticks, and you have missiles and jets... they have to use sticks. Can you imagine how they feel?
But yes, you're probably thinking of RPGs where the enemies are preprogrammed with the same hostility no matter what the circumstances, even if you're a God-killer and they're defending 5 coins and half-eaten sandwich in their den.
Some games did that(in part).
The original Gothic for example. When you were high level, other low level NPC would rather run.
I also thought hard about the concept, how to make FPS games still fun, but a bit more realistic. The thing is, in most settings this means reducing lots of enemies - as realistic would be, once you start shooting, they all come for you. Not 3. And then maybe another 2. And so on.. and then you would not have a chance, unless you get special powers (or quick save and quick load part of the mechanics)
Similarly, a mindless swarm doesn't present much opportunity for tactics, compared to a group with individual self-preservation instincts, and a manipulatable group morale level, or individual fear level mechanisms. On the other hand it's true that realism is not the goal. Reality is no fun, that's why we're playing a game. But it's a sort of distorted echo of reality, I suppose.
I see somebody in another comment complaining that enemies who get frightened rob the player of the fun of battles. So it depends what it's all about.
"Man, after I finished the main quest and slayed ther Dragon God(TM), nothing has attacked me for days. I guess I'll start a farm."
> I guess the "fun aspect" of seeing them flee and not restraining your movement at all could be slightly more satisfying than taking them down in a single hit one-by-one for the thousand time.
Chasing enemies is much more annoying than them coming to you, so that would be a punishment to the player.
Players don't like when you punish them in that way, they want to kill the monsters they don't want an upgrade that makes you more powerful make it harder to kill monsters since now they start running.
> Chasing enemies is much more annoying than them coming to you, so that would be a punishment to the player.
It seems I've failed to express myself clearly. The idea was that at some point, "low-level" adversaries simply stand no chance against a "high-level" PC, which should be obvious to both sides -- so acting accordingly on both sides would make sense without taking the fun out of the game, because -- and hear me out -- at that point in the game, chasing the low-level minions should be the last mechanic the player is forced to endure. When you are going for a dragon, you should not be forced to stomp your way past overly self-confident "newts" or mow down swarms of goblin youngsters…
Naturally, if the PC chooses to chase minions fleeing in terror after they took out the most courageous (or silly) third of their clan, that should be an option… and arguably it could even bring some satisfaction after the PC's low-level struggles, perhaps. But should this be the main mechanic? Definitely not -- at least not in the kind of game my thought experiment addressed.
The truly correct answer is give the player a mild damage aura/aoe and let the mobs die at your feet on their own. Running away breaks an annoying amount of mechanics, like ingredient farming.
The power fantasy just needs them to die trivially. So just do that.
I think games don’t have to be fun. There’s plenty of games where fun would be super inappropriate and yet the games are very popular. This applies to a lot of psychological or survival horror games. I think better is that a game must be compelling. There must be something encouraging you to play more, more so than any frustration or conflict the game introduces.
You definitely don't want too much realism, for most games - you probably don't want to manage bathroom trips! We just assume it happens "off camera"
But when humanoid enemies behave in plainly stupid ways it's a real immersion-breaker for me. I've been gaming a looooong time, so I'm quite adept at the necessary mental gymnastics to enjoy stuff anyway... but... still... games could be better here. (And by "better" I mean "more fun")
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.
But one where death is permanent / seriously bad; in Battlefield you just respawn so dying is not a major issue.
Check this one out: It's a F2P war game that ships with every new console. You only get one life in the game, so if you die, you can't play it anymore. It's not required to play, but heavily encouraged since it comes pre-installed.
World of warcraft and battle royale variants exist. One life across a 90 minute game is pretty high stakes, relatively speaking.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3028330/Battlefield_REDSE...
>CalebCity: “How fearless minions are in ANY video game”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OC375rujZhs
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.
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.
I'd argue that people want entertaining mechanics, not just mindless action. At least not always.
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.
Googling returned ‘PanicSystem’ https://www.nexusmods.com/battletech/mods/461 which says it builds on 2 other mods - I don't know if you used this one or another it built on etc?
The solution for your problem is playing a Souls game