I'm aware that IF this is considered (or already being considered), it won't be for a long time, but I feel it's important to consider. I don't know how much personalized dialogue there already is for NPC's, but one of the best features, in my opinion, of games like Baldur's Gate and the like, was that your party would banter with each other, as well as with you. Some of it wasn't great but overall it gave personality to the characters and made them feel like real people who I grew to care about and didn't want to die.
So essentially I'd like to see personalized dialogue (to at least some extent) for people in your party/clan and possibly for people who simply have certain dispositions towards you. The ability to learn about their pasts and likes and dislikes, etc. The ability to develop personal relationships with members of your party was always an important aspect of RPG's to me, and while I know I can't expect hundreds of NPC's in this game to have the same level of personality as 6 or 7 very specific NPC's in another AAA game, I feel like plenty could still be done to this end.
I know it would probably be far too much work to have a party of 30+ people banter with EACH OTHER, so I won't expect that to ever really make it in, but some sort of interaction with each other, even just in the background, for better or worse, where clan members develop relationships with each other. Whether those be romantic, hateful, or friendly, it creates dynamics within the party/clan that you may have to deal with and brings the whole thing to life.
There would also be an actual measure of disposition for how much people like other people, which could affect their interactions with each other. The people in your clan could develop relationships with each other, so maybe after joining your clan 2 people develop a romantic relationship. Maybe that's all it ever ends up being, but maybe one of them ends up hating you and leaves, so the other follows. Maybe one of them was a close friend of yours, but simply had greater loyalties to their partner.
Similarly, someone who hates you, and has more love from the clan than you do, might take chunks out of your clan when he leaves, leaving you with less people. Maybe they even hate you enough to start an actual mutiny, or come back later to wipe you out. Suddenly HOW you rule your clan also really matters. Or perhaps members of a bandit clan hates their leader, and you can persuade them to join you instead. You've just eliminated a bandit clan through diplomacy, and started your own clan.
---The following are just ideas for implementation, they can be ignored by most, as I don't know the actual inner workings of the game engine, this is just speculation. They are not polished ideas so I welcome suggestions. The better the idea the more likely it will get noticed by the devs
---I figure histories, likes and dislikes can be inserted to character templates, and there can be as many or as few as wanted. This makes them easy to be randomly applied when generating an NPC and easily inserted into dialogue when brought up. They can range from factions to races (if different skin colors count as races) etc, so that even the preferences of NPCs you don't know personally can affect you. (ie a racist merchant gives you a worse deal because he doesn't like you)
There would be a disposition meter, ranging from 0-100, 50 is neutral. This is only checked during interactions, otherwise it's just a stored number. There would be a separate file used to store these values, to account for the thousands of NPCs meeting each other. Each NPC would have a marker added to their list of disposition values for each NPC met. Likes, dislikes and various interactions would influence disposition one way or another to a certain degree based on the interaction. (So a bandit clan threatening to raze a town would cause everyone's disposition towards members of that clan to instantly drop to 0, and an NPC robbing another would cause the same result towards that NPC)
I know I specified not romances, but it would be easy enough to allow the player to start a family if an NPC has a high enough disposition towards them.
there could be anywhere between 3 to a couple dozen versions of each type of dialogue (So different lines all essentially saying the same thing, such as "I like you" or "I was a farmer" or responses to various questions or the other various things that could come up in dialogue with NPCs). There are "meanings" that a character can convey in conversation, each one has maybe 10-20 "dialogues" attached to them, so first the player talks, then the disposition of that NPC towards the player would be checked and an according meaning would be selected, from which an attached dialogue would be randomly generated. This keeps things varied.
