Animal behaviour

In a random wolf encounter I was reduced to being the observer of two battles
- a Grizzly Bear vs. a Timber Wolf and
- a Large Brown Bear vs. a Large Grey Wolf on the other side of the road

Both fought to the end and ignored me until then.

Considering that there is a skill to make tamed animals fight longer despite losing health I wonder why untamed animals don´t have that survival instinct and don´t simply flee combat with another animal when down to 1/3rd or so of their health...?

 

Because for gameplay that would be quite annoying after a while. Sometimes realistic things might seem cool at first, but when you have to chase down every animal, every single time you engage one and try to kill it, it would get old very fast. It would also make killing/taming them much easier for any player using attacks with range. They would no longer damage you once they started to run. And of course then there are the issues with leashing, if the animal ran too far from its spawn point.

 

Which is why I wrote "don´t simply flee combat with another animal". Some sort of cease-fire betweeen related factions. Not in a fight against the Avatar.

It is quite disturbing in some zones where I see no living animal and skin along the rows of corpses of dead animals lying around who killed each other...

 

Why would they flee another animal, but not a player. That would probably take some interesting code to perform that. Not worth the effort in my opinion.