Like in Stalker where the mutant dogs will turn tail and flee if they take too much damage or if you kill enough of their pack members. Red Dead Redemption's animals also ran away if a fight wasn't going their way.
Actually, Rockstar games are pretty good with this sort of stuff in general. I'm pretty sure you could shoot guns of of people's hands in RDR to make them put their hands up, or cause a fatal gunshot wound that would make them crawl around on their belly and call for help. Both GTA 4 and 5's enemies have injury states where they will take potshots at you with a pistol while bleeding on the ground or just passively clutch their wounds until they die.
I guess it wouldn't work in arcadey or linear games where the point is to kill everything on screen, but for anything more open-ended that tries to go for something approaching realism it'd be nice if the enemies you faced felt more alive and/or showed some basic survival instincts.
sign of a very good GM. my GM is like this as well. even his evilest bad guys have reasons for what they're doing, and fleshed out personalities and all. when the evil terrible super-lich isn't busy with his evil plans, he's perfectly willing to have a chat about philosophy or magic or something and isn't going to be doing anything evil. it doesn't mean we didn't crush his fucking skull later when he tried to take over the world or whatever, but it does mean we did that consciously based on knowing who he is, not just because he's The Bad Guy.
lower level threats like bandits often have very good reasons for doing what they're doing, and sometimes we've misunderstood and they aren't even bandits to begin with.
When the party finally got around to destroying the Big Bad Evil Guy of the campaign, a recurring villain that has been a menace for decades of real life campaigns, they still got wined and dined (no poison!) before the final confrontation because it meant that much to the BBEG to formally meet the particular heroes that would either permanently cement his invincibility and godhood (if they were defeated and spiritually harvested at the peak of their power) or annihilate him for all time. It was a tense dinner but a dinner all the same.
Aww, I love shit like that. My party encountered the aforementioned lich just wandering down the road. We were camping, he stopped by the campsite to have a chat. I can't remember what he was doing, he might have been actively searching for the macguffins required to enact his evil plans. But he was just on a long walk across the continent, and he did some high level wizard fortunetelling for us to prepare us for the difficulties we'd face where we were headed. And then he carried on. The whole thing was a little tense as well, because we could tell this guy was really powerful and probably evil. But there was no betrayal, no ulterior motives. He was just feeling nostalgic I think.
Later on someone mentioned his name, and my character, the only surviving party member from the time of that campfire chat, was just like "wait what? ive met that guy, he was some kind of turbo-evil super-lich?" and then they were like "what? the super-evil turbo-lich told you your fortune and carried on?" and they were just like
at each other
I love this so much.