More common than it used to be since enemy characters in games are now almost exclusively complex 3D models with highly-textured surfaces and built-in Ragdoll Physics. But even those items sometimes may disappear after a short while, an unrealistic feature common in old Beat Em Ups to keep players moving briskly. Occasionally, the game meets you halfway by having the bodies disappear while leaving behind any useful weapons or items the character was carrying. And finally, Moral Guardians may object to allowing players to do cruel and unusual things to a corpse for their personal entertainment. Another is that these objects could become actual obstacles that impede the player's progress - in free-roaming games, you could potentially find yourself blocked off by insurmountable piles of corpses, overturned furniture, gutted vehicles, and so on.

The main one is that keeping track of all the dead people, body parts and blood stains, dropped weapons, healing items, and bullet holes throughout every part of the environment the player has been in requires an increasing amount of memory - at least unless the game heavily restricts the player's ability to backtrack - with little to no practical effect on gameplay. You can turn a room into a grisly scene of carnage, and return five minutes later to find it as pristine as when you first entered, even down to smashed or shot-up parts of the environment having repaired themselves or if you stand there long enough, you can actually watch the corpses fade away. In video game land, dead and inanimate things often have a habit of vanishing into thin air after a certain time - they might evaporate, disintegrate, blink in and out of existence, crumble to dust which disappears, etc. Destroy All Humans! Big Willy Unleashed

System shock 2 no despawn mod