The Drunken Lizard Pub

Non-player-characters, the life-blood of any good story-driven RPG. They are also present in many other game genres and are generaly given AI (artificial intelligence) so that they appear alive. Most accomplish this with good dialogue. Usualy a player will be more inclined to interacting with NPCs when they can see and discover what their life is like. However many games make use of many NPCs with little, duplicated or no dialogue to give a sense of population in towns and such. And of course, a converstation with a potentialy hostile character is a rare find and does not last long.

In Eschalon, it is nice to see that almost every NPC is given a healthy amount of dialogue. However one thing that annoys me ALOT is that many npcs do their traditional POINTLESS ENDLESS STROLL (PES). If you're gonna make them walk around thats great, but make them have a destination. For example, instead of making a shopkeeper walk endlessly up and down his counter, make him visit storage and entering his shop triggers him to see you. I must also question how the blacksmith in Aridell manages to have a huge array of weapons yet only has ONE guard to supply. How did he gain the skill to create all that equipement? And I must admire their ability to stay posted all day and all night, and their ability to buy off anything you have regardless of price makes me wonder why they work anyway.

Yet this is a old-school game so you must make use of your imagination a bit and forgive. Thats alright. As long as the guard fends off them nasties like he's supposed to, not just watch you like the book he could be. But wait, all the other npcs either never move or move pointlessly. Sigh. I'd like to chat with that guard : "what's it like being the sole the defendor of Aridell versus hordes of goblins that have managed to pillage a stronghold and a similar village right beside you" or "can you TRAIN me?" !!! Why not?

It would be nice if you could shed a bit of light on whether there will be changes to any aspect of NPCs in the sequel. Also, will there be recurring characters? Will the hero of the previous adventure be mentioned during your quest?

One thing that I felt worked really well in the old Ultima games is the NPC's "Daily Routines."
They would wake up, go to work, travel home or to the pub for food, then sleep.

Personally, I think this goes a long way in not only breathing life into the environment, but also adds some legitimacy to the npc's themselves.

I loved EB1 but lets face it, as far as NPCs, there's really no character development going on there, and thus I felt no special attachment to anyone in particular.

I think that the "random" movement of NPCs is worse than no movement -as shop owners would seemingly wonder off, and I'd end up locking them in their stores so I could find them later.

I agree with pretty much everything you are saying here, but because ultima already did it, EB2 is going to have to do it better!