I'm wondering if they can really implement something in the citizens that makes them more alive. I know games like RDR2 had routines in their NPC's, but they were much more less than in CP77 because you were visiting a town or a village. Night City has a lot of space for having infinite more NPC's than RDR2 and translating that system into the game could be a nightmare. I know that having this huge city filled with random people it's a mess for that because you could start following anyone and you could suspect with not much time if it's acts are natural or a poor script. Obviously putting them individual lines of dialogues would be a colosal task so what can be done in this aspect?
One thing I've read that could be good for NPC's dialogues are just programming them lines of dialogue based on reactions of your character actions and how it looks maybe. Now they have a very poor system in which they only react when you push them dodging and they just scare the hell out, the one implied and the whole street. So I know it's a hard task involved to make really citizens have their little brains.
I think it is possible and it will be done and honestly I don't even think it's all that difficult for them to do. It will be difficult to go into all details of how it could be done. But this is just some initial thoughts.
There is not going to be some extremely advanced lifecycle in CP for each NPC, if people expect that, I think they might be fooling themselves, and there are good reasons for that, it would require unnecessary processing power to keep track of all these, and it's not the purpose of the NPC, that you as a player is suppose to follow them around spying on them for hours.
NPCs would have to be split into categories, as some are more generic than others.
Groups of NPCs
1. Vendors/Workers
These are all the NPCs that somehow is connected to a shop, whether that is one you can trade with or not. We sort of expect that its the same vendor standing in a food store even though we can't buy from them at the moment.
Each of these would require special attention and need to keep track of 3 things "working hours", "home" and "workplace".
Working hours, simply tell at which point the NPC is suppose to be at their store, let's say 6.00 - 22.00.
Home tells us where they live and where they will start and end their day.
Workplace is just where they work.
So after assigning them a building to live in, which could be a house (A locked door) near where they work. All they really have to do with such NPC, is first to check if the player is near them and then the time of day. If the player is there and it's around 22 and you are not interacting with them they go home or if it's morning, you see them go out of their assigned home and go to work. And basically they just keep track of these and spawn them in depending on whether or not the player is in the area or not. So should be fairly simple as I see it.
2. Generic
These would work sort of the same way, we already know that NPCs are spawned in at random around the player and currently this is not handled very well, and in some cases they spawn right in front of your eyes etc.
Basically two things as I see it need to be done here. An area around the player that covers their field of view and maximum view distance and line of sight will be used to spawning/despawning NPCs.
So let's imagine that V is standing in the street, any area which have line of sight to V is a spawn free zone. So no NPCs will suddenly appear or disappear in these areas. A zone around V even if there is no line of sight will be spawn/despawn free as well. So you won't suddenly notice people spawning in side streets, simply because you didn't have line of sight there for a few seconds. However there will be plenty of areas (depending on the size) around V where NPCs can spawn. Also the locked doors could be used as spawning places as it would make sense that people come and leaves houses, even within the viewing range of V. And my guess is that CDPR will fix this, it shouldn't really be that difficult I think.
Next part is to keep track of them, which again doesn't seem that difficult. So much like with the vendors, each of the NPC in the area around V will need a home, Activity period and a goal for the day (depending on how advanced it should be, several goals or new goals could be assigned to them on the fly), which means that if the player decide to follow an NPC around. They will do random things as each of their goal are completed, and when the activity period is up, they will go to their randomly assigned home and simply walk through the locked door and despawn.
This shouldn't be too difficult to do, because there is rarely a lot of NPCs on the street at the same time. We are not talking 1000s of them and some of them will leave the area or the player will, in which case they will despawn. So CP only need to keep track of those NPC around V at any given point. The rest doesn't matter.
Dialogs
These should simply be reacting to stuff both V does, without being annoying or like everyone is keeping track of you. Like in Skyrim or Fallout where everyone have a comment to you when you run past them, that really annoying and immersion breaking.
I personally don't think it's very important for V to be able to speak to these NPC, unless a lot of effort is put into making them say somewhat interesting or relevant things, if they don't it's better for them not to. But NPCs could comment on the news, talking in phones etc as they already do. And if they could comment on that, if you ask them stuff, it could be cool, maybe share some info about some new shops, which would give V new locations etc. But for the most part they should probably just be generic backdrops.
So I think there will be a lot of improvements to the NPC system, simply because I don't see it as being all that difficult for them to improve this, while still keeping it extremely basic. And again, I don't think anyone expect extremely advanced NPC life cycles, it would simply not be worth it.
However all this requires that the NPC can actually navigate the world first, which they can't at the moment. So that would probably be the first step.