Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

Each character has a fully fleshed out story and you can follow them all throughout the games timeline going work, worrying about the situations to the final hours. This is the most alive I have seen NPC's in a console game up to that point, with many of there stories which can move you very emotionally.

That doesn't happen in the party-based RPGs I generally play.
Didn't I just mention that game?

Yes and there are actually a lot of missable quests if you don't talk to the npc or visit a location at a specific time or date...and this happens on all 3 games.

Tropico and all its incarnations.
I know I've also played older rpg or two where I've waited for an npc to wake so I can talk to them but memory is falling me atm. I'm sure get mentioned if this thread gets more traction.

Remember something on MobyGames about an old IF game that was like that, let's see... Ah, here we go, Knight Orc. Seems to be the oldest on this list so far, just edging out dtgreene's examples of Ultima 5 and Dragon Quest 3.

Hard War.

The game takes place in Titan (Saturn's moon). Every NPC had things to do.

They bought and sold, which changed the markers in real time.

They broke laws to make some side money, if they weren't terribly moral or afraid if the police.

They joined factions and went to was with their opponents.

They scavenged destroyed ships.

They all worked on their own time table and interacted with one another every moment of every day.

The developed said it was fun to read their logs. It read like a diary.

Picked up iron scraps. Traded those for unit of uranium. Got caught smuggling uranium across City lines. Destroyed cop cruiser. Outran another cop. Don't go back to Central hub. Warrant for my arrest announced. Change factions. Get job from fraction. Steal rockets. See ship. Scan ship. Raw materials. See another ship. Scan ship. Rockets. Target and destroy ship. Shop is better equipped than me. Taking damage. Retreat toward faction base. Are you still reading this?

Thank you for all the examples (way more than I thought there would be!), and apologies for the late reply. I've been on the fence some time with regard to the Risen series, but this makes me more inclined to get off. The whole pirate atmosphere is what is so alluring, which will be made all the better by a world that feels 'real'. Are the cycles similar to Oblivion in that it's not the same cycle each day?

Wow ok, that's pretty impressive. But I think I'm going to go ahead and stay away from that game for the time being. Seems like the type of game that will gobble up whole weeks at a time :P The samurai series premise does sound interesting thanks for the mention, but MUD-style games? Only briefly entertained the idea of entertaining the idea, but just not my cup of tea I'm afraid

Now that is a series I've wanted to get into for a long time, but the problem is I just don't know where to start. Several consoles, sometimes backwards compatible, sometimes not etc. Need to take the time to figure out what's the least amount of consoles needed to play all of them, how viable emulation is for some of them and so on :P
Hmm, definitely not the kind of game I expected to see here :P It'd be very interesting to see how it was implemented
Now that Blade Runner has been released, this is my biggest wish for a gog release. Absolutely stellar game, and I only ever played the demo!

I remember seemingly random engagements with other moths, but I never knew those were individual characters in the game going about their lives. Definitely the biggest surprise so far, because I didn't realize the game is even better than I remembered :)

In Quest for Glory series NPCs have daily cycle. In fact, even some quests are dependant on the time of the day, as you can find certain characters in certain places only at certain time. I remember several times rushing to the Inn, since they serve supper only at certain time.

In Arcanum day-night cycle also present, I think.

IMO the games that are the best for simulating NPCs with actual lives are The Trails in the Sky games and the Trails of Cold Steel games (and also 2 other games in the Trails series which have not yet ever been released in the West and/or in English which are commonly called "Crossbell").

Time doesn't work the same way in those Trails games as it does in games like Oblivion or Fallout 3, so in Trails games you don't see the NPCs moving around as much in real-time, and going to bed and waking up and stuff like that, but, the NPCs in Trails-type games are still much more deep and fleshed-out than are their counterparts in the kind of games which are mentioned in the OP.

That's because you can talk to every single NPC in the world in the Trails games, and each of them has a new & unique conversation with you, and it gets updated to another new & unique conversation anytime you talk to them again after something new has happened in the story.

So that means you can have thousands of unique conversations if you talk to every NPC during every opportunity to do so.

If you want the series with the least amount of consoles, you could get a Gamecube with the Game Boy Player and a 3DS; the Gamecube covers 1 and 2 plus OoT and MM (beware nasty game freezing bug, which is bad because of the way the save system in this particular Zelda works) as well as Wind Waker and Twilight Princess; the Game Boy Player covers Link's Awakening, along with Link to the Past (via GBA version) and Minish Cap. The 3DS covers Link Between Worlds, then you just need a Wii U for Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild. The only one missing (not counting spin-offs like Hyrule Warriors, and not counting the garbage CDi games) is the Link's Awakening remake on the Switch.

With that said, this may not be the cheapest or most practical (legal) way of acquiring the series, as the Game Boy Player might be hard to find, and the disk that comes with it even rarer (though if you can hack the Gamecube, you can use the Game Boy Interface in its place). A Game Boy Advance (not Micro, unless you don't care about Link's Awakening) can replace the Game Boy Player, and the Gamecube games have been remastered for the Wii U,

As for emulation, if you'd rather go that route, almost every Zelda game can be emulated; I believe people have even gotten Breath of the Wild and the Switch Link's Awakening to work (though I don't know how playable it is, and you will need a powerful computer). The Zelda games that tend to be hardest to emulate, other than the modern ones, are the Nintendo 64 ones, interestingly enough (though you could just emulate the Gamecube disk or Wii Virutal Console versions), or even their 3DS versions.

My recommendation, if you want to experience the entire series, and aren't picky about either legality or DRM, is to buy the modern games (Switch and 3DS, perhaps Wii U as well, and you'll have DS and Wii covered via backwards compatibility) and emulate the older ones.

Lure of the Temptress was an early one where the NPCs all wandered about during the day. (I didn't play enough to discover night time activity). Some might visit a pub. Some might go to their workplace. Some might go for a walk.

Unfortunately their implementation suffered from two main problems.
1. PCs and NPCs would endlessly bump into each other.

2. When tasked to find someone, you would have no idea where would be, and random searching was of little help as they kept moving into the areas I had already searched.

Its a free game in GOG, although it is only for the masochists.