I dont go with the argument that normal wolves or bears would attack on sight because they're starving. There's plenty of preys for them, running around : chickens, boars, rabbits, deers/stags.
I generally agree with this. I mean, this is all being really over-analyzed anyways for 7D2D, but you'd need to look at the spawning ratios here to determine if this is in fact accurate from the standpoint of population stability. There's also the whole ambiguity of whatever the "virus" (for lack of a more definitive term) does, but more on that below.
Given the situation where a huge part of the human population has been eradicated, there's less of us to interfere with predators like such and their search for sustenance, therefore allowing them easier access to it.
This is a bit trickier since we don't know the actual impact of whatever happened. There is evidence of nuclear detonation in the game, not to mention enormous swaths of destroyed environments, radiated zones, etc. You could easily argue the opposite way, that despite the diminished human presence, there is also a greatly reduced number of wildlife and livable space for them, so that the humans who still exist are hunting them at increased rates. There also seems to have been a predatory population explosion in some areas (I'm looking at you mountain lions in the snow biome) that might be unsustainable and we just happened to nakies spawn in right around the time everything was going hangry.
I also dont buy the idea that they would resort to eating zombified flesh, consequently infecting them and making them aggressive. I would find it more plausible for vultures since they literaly are scavengers. As far as i know, i dont recall wolves and bears enjoying rotten and tainted flesh.
As far as I know you're correct about bears and wolves. From a cursory search they only eat rotten meat in small quantities or in dire circumstances. "Tainted" is a bit more ambiguous though. We don't really know what makes the zombies, zombies in the 7D2D world yet. So for all these predatory animals know some of the zombies might not give off any of the hallmark signs of "rot" that the animals are instinctively aware to avoid. Since a lot of these predators aren't generally hunting humans for consumption, we can presume they probably aren't specifically hunting the zombies for sustenance either. They might, however, eat incapacitated zombies because real-life bears and wolves will frequently eat the corpses of creatures they didn't specifically hunt and kill so long as they aren't excessively rotten. This gets to the point of how the virus is transmitted, if the not-zombified prey can be infected, the "virus" is airborne, is in the water, is in the sham, etc.
Now, that doesnt mean wolves/bears cant be infected in any way since we do have Dire Wolves and Zombie Bears. But it would be good to know what are the vectors of transmission of the virus and therefore, maybe have a visual, in-between normal and full-zombie state, that would explain normal-looking animal that are still overly aggressive.
I think we'll have to wait and see what, if anything, TFP decide to offer as to the origin of the 7D2D world. My guess is stuff like this will be mostly left up to players to debate, but who knows, maybe we'll get something that definitively structures how the "virus" works. I agree more models would be cool, but I think you'd first have to decide if there was much point to have anything between a normal wolf and a dire wolf, and
then weigh that against other production considerations.
But otherwise, normal, untainted animals should keep their natural behavior reminiscent of real-life.
We don't know if any of the animals are
actually untainted or if they just appear to be so to our unknowing eyes, nor do we know just how much the 7D2D world has deviated from real-life. Makes "should" statements like this hard to quantify.
I would be happy if they just stopped animals running into spikes until they die...IF they did hit them once , they would run away and not dance around on them till they die...
Just that change would be good enough for me
All the blobs of text I wrote above aside, I'm definitely on board with this one for the "normal" predators as they currently exist, it also seems like it could realistically be implemented to how certain entities behave, but I'm no expert there.