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.
We might of actually gotten worse since then. I might not be remembering right but I think at the start of the GWOT the view of special forces guys was that they were cool professionals, and it's only since then that image of SpecOps as torture cowboys who do what they want because they're cool guys became the dominant public image.
YOu can definitely see it in how spec ops clothing is depicted. 20 years ago they wore uniforms in most depictions, now they were a random mish-mash of civilian cool guy gear in a lot of depictions.