I quite like how Sniper elite handles this. As you are tagging enemies, small snippets about them pop up. So the Nazi you have in your scopes might love jazz music even though it's illegal, or might draw caricatures of his fellow soldiers that give them some light hearted relief or might have tried out for the ss and failed the medical and takes his anger out on the locals.

It genuinely changes how I play the game. If they seem like they are just someone caught in the Nazi machine I tend to spare them if I can but I make pretty sure to end the true believers.

That's a real fucking tease if I can't also kill and loot his kid.

BG3 did this in a few places. It might have even been a sign that you could've interacted with this person had you gone about things a different way.

Foreshadowing on where to get more loot.

One of my favorite small Skyrim mods distributed a wedding ring to random nameless NPCs, most of whom were bandits. Not quite the same, but it still added a little depth to encounters and would usually make me say "oh dammit" when I found one. I wish I could find the damn thing.

This would be a good use for LLMs. Humanizing random NPCs to encourage players to take non-violent routes.

There's a bit of this in The Witcher 3. Usually in quests though, but maybe there should be a way to loot them before you kill them?

I would put this in a game as an untracked quest except if you really dig around it was actually someone that killed the parent and started living as him so if you revert save and keep him alive eventually the kid will show up and some manner of altercation will happen depending on how you completed relevant tracked quests

Me: "I wonder if I can find this dude's kid in game and reunite them... 🤔"

Grim Dawn's Asterkarn diary is the best subversion of this trope.

Only for a courier to deliver you a letter with your inheritance.

Should've gotten good.

Git gud scrubs