You’re listing outliers that did well despite their smaller marketing budget. There are tons of great games from smaller studios that get buried because nobody knows about them.
Basic builder units. You commit genocide against an entire civilization but leave one of these fuckers alive and 20 minutes later you’re facing en entire army.
I hated this in GTA (mainly 3 and SA). You’re doing an escort mission and suddenly 6 guys start shooting at you with AKs from nowhere because you pissed them off in an unrelated quest.
I prefer a Morrowind-like approach where enemies don’t scale and you have to take care not to venture too deep into some crazy gang’s territory early on.
But it’s much much harder to make this work properly, and scaling enemies have become an expectation by players at this point.