There is a delicate balance though. The draw of the RPG is that you play a character who usually has an outsized impact on the world in comparison to most everyone else. If we expect the NPCs to operate as independent entities, how do we manage their ambition so that they don't individually, or in aggregate, impact the world more than you? Without that, your character becomes another cog in the machine; it's their world and you are simply living in it... Which I could see having a certain appeal and may be just another genre.
Some of the most hilarious and enjoyable parts of gaming is manipulating the environment in ways developers didn't anticipate. With more intelligent NPCs there will be opportunities to give them instructions, and let them go to get it done.
Crafting instructions that lead to NPC's working to achieve a goal that wasn't anticipated, and provides you with a resource that couldn't otherwise be had in the game, will be a whole new aspect to gaming, and inspire a desire to experiment and explore.
That sounds really cool, as a genre, actually. You would have to figure out what given NPCs actually want, and how you may be able to use that, to make them do what you want. And not based on some lame script, but complex world and character models. I'm sold!
closest thing ive gotten to that is eu4. How good the diplomacy model feels ebbs and flows, but I really do love the feeling of sitting there analysing alliance structures, friendships, rivalries, desires for specific bits of land etc until I finally figure out how to break up that bloc/pry out that country from their alliance group/get that large power to have reason to ally with me, a tiny dutchy
What makes cyberpunk 2077 such a great game is that the world doesn't revolve around you, it exists despite you, and you see this in all of the side-quest events that are happening in the background. The world being alive despite you, and not for you adds a whole new dimension to the universe.
Sandbox games are pretty big. Not my thing at all, but I’m sure there’d be a big market for believable open-world RPGs for example. They’d probably be more simulators than narrative-driven games.
