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.
Imo this is more of a D&D problem than a TTRPG problem, but most people are introduced through D&D so it has propagated. D&D used to have morale mechanics in I want to say AD&D 1e and 2e but I'm almost certain they were removed by 3e. At the end of the day, murdering everything is just easier for everyone involved. It wouldn't really be that hard to add them back in, but it would likely be problematic in D&D played as intended for a number of reasons.
Do you get more XP for killing things (encouraging murder anyway)? If the XP is the same, what happens if you end up fighting the same person twice (it's not unreasonable for many beings to seek revenge)? What do the PCs do with defeated banditos etc when they're halfway through a dungeon and the prisoners quickly outnumber them? Is it expected that the PCs will rob anyone/thing who surrenders of their things (and what does it do to the intended progression if they don't)?
For what it's worth I typically use a loose morale system in my games (typically GURPS so based on Will with modifiers), combined with common sense. Eg in our last session a skilled enemy combatant was outnumbered 2:1 and had been shot despite turning invisible, so she ran for backup, and once she was away, the party fled with their mission incomplete because they didn't figure they could deal with her and the backup.
Nobody used them. Monsters fought to the last man. Players really enjoyed that part of the game when the monsters were losing and yet fought on. The PCs felt in control of the situation. For many, this was the first time in their lives they felt this way.
The knife twist at the end
Yeah. People joke about it now but being a nerd back in the 90s and prior could be very, very rough. Especially given how many nerds were neurodivergent kids violently excluded from other options.
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