Agreed! My fear is too much NPC agency will lead to exactly what we see in the real world: conflict. Great, that's the interesting bit! I just worry that without careful planning we'll be facing an NPC battle-royale, and an empty map isn't a particularly fun one.
Of course, it is a high bar that most game companies could get nowhere near, but Dwarf Fortress already makes an interesting world dynamically. Maybe an LLM could be dropped into that world to give it some characters.
