I always liked this feature, going back to at least the original DOOM, where you could lure enemies into accidentally hitting each other which would cause them to focus on each other. I love it in RPGs, where you could stumble upon guards fighting a dragon in Skyrim, or Might & Magic VII-VIII where monster fights could occur. Or seeing the Covenant fight the Flood in Halo. or STALKER.
Looking for more good examples of games where enemies attack each other, either as a result of you manipulating them to hit each other, or just as part of an ecosystem (prey/predator) or just as a result of animosity dictated by the setting.
ELEX is a recent example. I was disappointed that Wasteland 2 featured very little of this. In fact, the two end-game enemy factions were in collusion!
Assassin’s Creed: Origins has this in spades. Bandits, Romans, and Ptolemy’s army will get into fights with each other and they will in turn be attacked by random predator animals like lions, crocodiles, and hippos.
In Horizon Zero Dawn the robots will attack human bandits. It’s rare but when they run into each other it happens. Also you can use corruption arrows or hack machines to turn the machines against each other.
Deus Ex. UNATCO really hates that cleaning bot. ;) (the first couple of minutes is the set up to make this happen.)
But more seriously, I recall being amused by Fallout 4 factions attacking each other, sometimes even when the player character wasn’t around. I was running around the outskirts of Boston at one point and came across a corpse (lootable) of one of those tough super mutants. It was early enough in the game that I struggled with those guys, and I thought to myself, man, what killed this guy?
Several steps later I encountered a bandit leader… on half health. At least their previous fight made it easier for me to finish off this guy. :D
EverQuest m9nsters aligned with different ‘factions’ could hate eachother if their factions were opposed, and they could be moved and forced to attack eachother. There were also the default City Guard type NPCs that would attack goblins and stuff that wandered too close to city gates, but the faction system worked everywhere in the game, and you’d often find poachers and such out in the world being killed by Rangers or whatever for attacking wolves etc. Same goes for stuff like dragons or other things too.
Fallout 4 is awesome at this. With some of the spawning mods you can get some fantastic and fun multi-faction fights. Coming upon these is one of my favorite things.
Man, I remember being absolutely entranced the first time I spotted Pinky turn and start beating the shit out of the imp that fireballed him. It was a real “holy crap” moment.
Thief 2 was fun for that, too. Everybody hated spiders. Even other spiders.
In Gothic 2 you could kite dangerous critters to town, where a guard would take care of them while you ran back and took all their stuff. Not that I did that. Much.
Grim Dawn often has opposing factions fighting in the wild as you come across them (both as scripted npc types and pure enemy types which can all be killed).
Stalker and Halo are such great examples of how that sort of thing sets the mood.
The Mercenary game published by Lucas had some sort of that, although the fights felt a bit like set pieces when you ran into them.
The Soldak games have factions, whether you witness them fighting or not.
Cogmind hasn’t totally this (there aren’t factions fighting, and the robot don’t aggro each other because of lost bullets), but a variation of it: the game takes place in a system with robotic screws, and you can exploit that system to generate chaos. It yields a great sense of place as you get familiar with how it works.
While a lots of roguelikes/lites have it, more surprisingly the Shiren series on console do feature it, although mainly when blind monsters happen to hit each others. But in that game it can have terrifying consequences, as the monsters level up, and their levelling up doesn’t equal the usual higher numbers, but increase their noxiousness by exponential factors! Run!
I think it is quite common amongst space games, but Freespace 2 did feature it in some amazing missions, didn’t it?
The first time I saw it in Doom, I was completely blown away. Those monsters weren’t just mindlessly hunting after me. They were busy living their own lives when I wasn’t around and I was peeking in to see a little slice of it.
Fallout 3 is the best example I can think of, because so many encounters are random and occur close to other faction spawn locations. It was very common to hear explosions in the far distance, or round a corner to find a BoS patrol being drawn into a site full of supermutants, or a trader caravan fighting radscorpions when off-roading.
Exactly. It really made the game special for me. Remembering that feeling and how much that dynamic added to some early RPGs (and the other games Gordon Cameron mentioned above) made me want to hear of other examples. I really like the way Bethesda’s games have captured that aspect from the Ultima games too.
Keep them coming! Telefrog’s description of Assassin’s Creed Origins will probably get me to buy that game, so this thread is delivering!
The Last of Us: Left Behind DLC featured a sequence where you had to deal with infected and human enemies at the same time and luring them into each other was a lot of fun.
When I played Far Cry 3 I once watched a group of friendly NPCs take out all the enemies and liberate a camp without my help.
In all the recent Far Cry games the hostile animals will aggro both friendly and enemy NPCs.
Fallout was mentioned, so Skyrim. The entire game is set up as factions against each other and one of the DLCs did the same thing.
Though some of it involved scripted quests and set pieces, a lot of it did not. Bandit attacks, random run-ins between patrols, etc. Honestly I think adding human NPCs versus non-humans and dragons is also a good example.
