this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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submitted 1 day ago by Tervell@hexbear.net to c/games@hexbear.net
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https://x.com/TNOQuoProQuid/status/2015872269482946858

Kudos to the STALKER games (at least the original X-Ray engine ones, haven't played STALKER 2 yet) for actually having wild animals that behave at least somewhat like living creatures and not killbots. Dogs (the regular, not pseudodog variety) will swarm you when in packs, but if you take a few of them out they'll start giving up and running away, and lone dogs encountered in the wild are pretty cowardly. Fleshes, being just mutated pigs, are generally pretty chill unless you get right up in their face. Boars are wilder, but it's kind of the boar stereotype that they're very aggressive.

Even among the more dedicated enemy mutants, like bloodsuckers, you still see them actually take advantage of their cloaking ability to maneuver around you and try to get good angles of attack rather than just charging in, and retreat when wounded (Call of Pripyat added a really nasty attack where if they catch you from the back they'll just latch on and straight up drink you like a vampire for massive damage, potentially instakilling on higher difficulties, so fighting them becomes this really cool dance where you have to somehow make sure you're always facing frontward an opponent that can become invisible).

I also hear good things about Rain World and its NPC AI

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[–] Infamousblt@hexbear.net 18 points 1 day ago

I'm playing Kingdom Come 2 and the wolf thing cracked me up. When you have your sword out the wolves circle you and attack your shins one at a time. So I figured okay well I'll pull my bow out since it's basically a QTE to kill them with a sword maybe a bow is better.

Nope. Wolves know the difference between a sword and a bow and they all attack you nonstop if you have a bow out.

It's extremely silly

[–] Keld@hexbear.net 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

This guy makes a game with heroic nazis (members of the NSDAP) which lionises neocons (Actual neocons like Scoop Jackson) to an almost fetishistic degree.

[–] Horse@lemmygrad.ml 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

the two genders of HoI players; nazi or communist, there is no inbetween

[–] Keld@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago

~~There's only one gender in the hoi4 fan base, trans gender.~~

[–] Soot@hexbear.net 14 points 1 day ago

Another delicious STALKER win. How that old series warms me so.

[–] huf@hexbear.net 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

is it a boar stereotype that they're very aggressive? it's pretty much the only dangerous wild animal around here and yeah, if you startle it and ignore its warnings, it'll fuck you up. especially if it's got piglets.

but normally you just dont walk straight towards it and everyone stays safe. they dont want to attack you, like any sane herbivore, they just wanna get away.

if they were aggressive, surely we'd see lots of disemboweled people, but that really only happened to medieval kings who went out to deliberately hunt boars. retaliating to being hunted is not really aggressive behavior.

edit: couldnt find the stats, but i'd say we easily kill thousands of boars per year by hitting them with cars, while they cause maybe a couple of injuries per year. deaths from boars seem super rare.

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

idk about boars but I hear there's a real issue with encountering dozens of feral hogs in your backyard.

[–] godisidog@hexbear.net 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

How many feral hogs are a problem exactly? Could you give an estimate?

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 16 points 1 day ago

I think the median was 40, but they didn't give a weighting on the numbers so that's just conjecture.

[–] SerialExperimentsGay@hexbear.net 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, the danger from boars is actually overstated a lot. They do happen to be just the right size to puncture the femoral artery with their tusks when they topple somebody, but that's just not something that happens a lot. If you've ever encountered boars with piglets, it's really really obvious that they are setting up a defensive formation where they shelter the piglets in the middle between the mother sows and the big guys trot out to the frontline and get ready to charge you, it's very obvious what they are doing there and you have to be extremely reckless, stupid or both to not to back off when they do this.

[–] huf@hexbear.net 7 points 1 day ago

i genuinely think they got a bad reputation because of all the kings and nobles they killed during hunts.

ordinary people were familiar with domesticated pigs, i doubt they would've been mystified or terrified of the wild version

[–] doublepepperoni@hexbear.net 8 points 1 day ago

It actually threw me off in RDR2 that boars are completely passive aside from one scripted encounter with a legendary giant boar in a mission late in the game. With all the shit I've heard about how dangerous they are I expected to get charged but they just run away no matter how many of their buddies you turn into bacon

[–] la_tasalana_intissari_mata@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

boars aren't herbivorous no?

[–] huf@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

eh, yeah they're omnivores but i expect most of the stuff they eat is plant material because there's just so much more of it and it doesnt run away. they're definitely not gonna predate a whole ass human. they will probably eat a corpse, no problem though.

[–] 7bicycles@hexbear.net 14 points 1 day ago

Sad to report they really botched the animals and mutants in Stalker 2

[–] CrawlMarks@hexbear.net 14 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I quit a Skyrim save one time because a low level wolf wouldn't stop attacking me and I didn't want to kill it.

Like, It chased me across the map and would wait for me if I went someplace it couldn't follow. I just gave up on that save file. I might have uninstalled soon after I think.

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've definitely played Skyrim trying not to kill animals. Just going through a door (and waiting if needed) covers almost every situation and if you invest in Illusion magic to cast Calm, it becomes trivial. You can also start as a Wood Elf or an Imperial to cow them with a Power, too.

[–] Horse@lemmygrad.ml 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

you can also read all the tablets on the 7000 steps to get this:

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 10 points 1 day ago

True, but it only last an in-game day and requires looking at every tablet every time, so I think it's just a novelty and not a mechanic worth ever actually using unless you have a specific quest or something where it's especially pertinent. Once you have Shouts unlocked, it's way better to just get Animal Allegiance imo if you don't want to use Illusion magic for whatever reason. Even just one word of it is more than fine for most purposes, and two words are pretty easily accessible (the third can only be found in a tomb unlocked in the last Companion quest).

[–] Horse@lemmygrad.ml 8 points 1 day ago

sounds like you picked up a very intense pet

[–] RION@hexbear.net 7 points 1 day ago

It was just bewitched by Hircine or something

[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Rain World has some very fun AI and I can't claim it's "realistic" but it's definitely more vibrant than you usually see

[–] invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I like that they didn't just do "player character vs everyone". The PC is just part of the food chain, and is viewed as a target or threat based on what else is around. It makes it feel really dynamic when the AIs are all interacting with each other instead of just idling until your character is in range

[–] Tervell@hexbear.net 4 points 1 day ago

I like that they didn't just do "player character vs everyone"

This is also something I appreciated in STALKER: Call of Pripyat - for the first two zones of the game, there generally aren't any human enemies who are immediately hostile. There's some bases where you won't be let in, but they'll specifically warn you on the radio to fuck off a couple times before actually opening fire (and one of those is actually part of a side quest where you can help them out and gain entry). Only by getting deliberately involved in the various faction conflicts as part of side-quests will you get to a point of some stalkers just shooting you on sight.

(Now of course, you are inevitably going to end up doing a lot of those side quests since that's where a lot of the game's content is, but still, even this small degree of other NPCs actually being reasonable rather than terminators programmed to hunt the protagonist is beyond what most games do, including the other STALKER games - Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky very much didn't have this, with CS especially was heavily focused on fighting human enemies and forcing you into such faction conflicts as part of its main story. And the cool thing about this is that when you do eventually encounter enemies who are openly hostile, like in CoP's final zone, it feels all the more impactful - the Monolith faction ostensibly being religious fanatics in the lore doesn't really amount to much in gameplay in SoC and CS where they just shoot on sight like hundreds of other human enemies you've encountered up to that point, but in CoP it actually feels like you're encountering a whole new class of enemy)

[–] Des@hexbear.net 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The Long Dark. although their excuse that the wolves have become hyper aggressive from a geomagnetic storm which... uhhh ok.

at least they have a setting in the sandbox to make them realistically skittish i just wish i also made them aggressive if you get too close too fast instead of just having them run away always

[–] KoboldKomrade@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago

God someone needs to make a "realistic" northern survival game. The Long Dark got such good vibes when you aren't worrying about wolves instead of freezing and starving.

[–] lilypad@hexbear.net 1 points 1 day ago

I wasnt optimistic about stalker 2, given all the bullshit stalker2 announcements over the past what, decade? But then a friend said it was really good! Aaaaaand it wasnt bad, but it didnt scratch the stalker itch. It didnt have the delicious eurojank feeling, it was too glossy, and the enemies were... Idk just didnt have the same feel as in og stalker. Mutants were just another enemy, and the danger wasnt something to be overcome with tactics, but with bruteforce it felt like. I was never scared playing stalker 2. In ShoC, i was terrified on multiple occassions (agoroprom underground being the first "oh fuck oh no i wanna go home" experience. I went in without enough ammo, didnt have a good savepoint to go back to to try and get ammo, and had to deal with bandits first. Then the bloodsucker came and i was so scared. It was great).

Stalker2 isnt a bad game, it just doesnt scratch the stalker itch for me. Why would i play it when i could play CoC/M, or Anomaly, or Narodnaya Solyanka OP-2?