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.
Judgement is a spectrum:
That's a real fucking tease if I can't also kill and loot his kid.
Can't have a kid grow up without a parent. It's the only humane solution.
Oh no, the kid had a letter from his dog...
Closed captions: [John Wick]: subtle whisper I wouldn't...
How bad is it that my first though was: "I wonder how much xp the kid is worth?"
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.
If the bandit had a wedding ring in their inventory, that's no indication that they are the original owner. You have good odds of avenging the death of whoever they took it off of.
True. I remember one time, though, I'd cleared out Silent Moons Camp and was looting the bodies - I found four or five rings. They couldn't have ALL stolen them, right? I guess part of the fun is making up your own story. But it made me FEEL something after years of clearing bandit camps (I felt like a monster, but still)
This would be a good use for LLMs. Humanizing random NPCs to encourage players to take non-violent routes.
Some games are trying to embrace the people of the land concept and I fuckin love it.
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?
You mean pickpocketing?
Yeah, something like that, but that's not a feature as far as I'm aware.
I'm only good at putting live explosives in other peoples' pockets though.
Do you kill the cat school witcher who dlaughtered a village lr do you let him live?
In fact, I usually try to avoid getting into fights or uneccessary violence, the only exceptions being killing Whoreson Junior, and getting into a fight in that inn in Skellige over the 'law of hospitality', which didn't end well.
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
I would just subtly add pressure to turn the main character into a necromancer, resurrecting the good people they killed and trying to make good on their wrongs, whilst slowly succumbing to the dark magic that will ultimately consume them and turn them into the worst bloodmage villain that teletubbyland has ever seen
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
