You should deffo look up Stalkers A-Life system, and especially mods that restored many of the A-Life features that were dummied out of the production release’s code. A-Life had a lot of stuff going on with NPC stalkers taking on quests, animals moving from region to region. I think they turned it off because it made the game unpredictable to the players in ways that weren’t fun. Things like you get to an outpost and everyone’s dead because mutants killed them when the player was somewhere else, but from the player’s perspective a bunch of NPCs died for no reason.

Cepheus protocol has something like this. The player is part of a government agency that has to fight zombies in order to find a cure and stop patient zero. The player controls squads of soldiers and scientsts, builds fortifications, builds refugee camps to manage civilian evacuations, captures points in the city to get resources.

The zombies have an AI RTS engine going. They start out in one part of the city and over time they send infection units to increase the infection level in a given city district. Civilians are actually a re-source that the player and the zombie AI are fighting over - The zombie AI tries to take over districts of the city and as it converts more civilians it’s able to send more zombies at the player as well as infect other parts of the city. The player, meanwhile, wants to evacuate civilians from the city to deny the zombie AI more territory and more zombies. Managing civilian evacuation is one of the game’s most unique aspects. The player can build refugee camps, screen incoming civilians for zombie infection, shoot anyone who is infected, and evacuate survivors out of the city. You’re dealing with tens of thousands of civilians so it’s a significant infrastructure task and civilians on the move are vulnerable to attack. It’s usually in the players interest to build large numbers of shelters safely behind protected walls so the player can screen civilians and put them in a safe fortress where there’s little risk of them turning in to zombies under the AI’s control. You want to get all those people on helicopters ASAP. You can also massacre civilians as an evil way to stop them from being infected which will make some AI factions turn against you. I think your own soldiers have some kind of morale mechanic, too, that makes massacres an extreme option instead of just a lol evil gamer thing.

In my campaign I ended up in a losing numbers battle against the zombie RTS AI. Due to lack of experience and some iffy game mechanics I was only able to evacuate and control small parts of hte city while the infection had completely overtake significant areas. I bombed the bridges between islands where the infection was strongest but I was still getting gradually over-run by increasingly evolved zombie enemies. It got to the point where I was only holding one district because I had a gauntlet of tanks and machine guns that could fire down one long, narrow street with high walls on either side that the zombies had to move through. Once they found a way to flank me I was forced to evacuate the whole district. The math was simple; The infection was overwhelming me and infecting civillians far faster than I could stop or contain it. In the end I had to load all my soldiers on to the aircraft carrier that acts as your home base then use LCAC hovercraft to launch a beach assault on the zombies primary stronghold. I abandoned the city to make a last-gasp decapitation strike against the super-powered Patient Zero AI because there was no way I could win a drag out boxing match.

All in all it was very cool with game systems interacting to create an emergent narrative. From what I understand the game has enough depth and variables that different campaigns can play out in wildly different ways based on the game’s starting conditions and the player’s tactics, skills, and knowledge.

Dorf Fortress. I’m not aware of anything that goes as deep or as hard as Dorf Fortress.

Behind the scenes there wasn’t really simulation going on in Oblivion. All those character actions were scripted - Go to work at x time, go to the park, go to the tavern, go home to bed. I made a lot of them while modding back in the day. Like they’d eat food off the ground, but that was part of a script that searched for objects around them to interact with rather than a simulation system where they’d get hungry or pick up valuables.

Kenshi has a good bit of simulation - characters have complicated health, damage, food, and other states that get tracks. It’s not nearly as detailed as something like DF though.

Shenmue.

Didn’t come out in the last 10 years, but the third installment did

Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdon has a good day/night cycle, and the NPCs often follow schedules. You can follow them around town and see their daily lives, and even many of the overworld NPCs seem to have destinations and jobs

I just remembered Shadows of Doubt, I think that’s the most recent game with this system that I’ve played. It has proc gen cities where every citizen has a job and a sometimes spontaneous daily routine. Every few days a citizen will murder another one and leave behind a trail of evidence. It’s supposed to hit 1.0 this month as well.

Very raw and buggy in places but in ways that leads to more hilarious outcomes. You hide in a freezing vent waiting for someone to head out to the club for them to apparently decide nah not tonight 2 seconds after leaving the building and catch you in the middle of reading their emails.

Rimworld is just barely too old for your criteria, apparently having been released initially in 2013. The day/night schedule of your colonists is under your control subject to their needs and breaks, and the world outside your base is doing stuff which affects you over time.

Star Citizen has promised pretty much everything to everyone waving money at the grift, and one of those promises was NPCs that would be so convincing that players wouldn’t be able to distinguish them from other players. This was mostly hyped about in “bartender tech” which is exactly what it sounds like: janky and awkward interactions with bartender NPCs in the many 90s-like space malls in the game’s single star system that are there because Chris Roberts peaked in the 90s just like many of his contemporaries.

Warning: this video is from a true believer doing the legwork of “simulating” what they think “bartender tech” will someday be doing, while the actual current build, years later, is t-posing and janky movements.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LejdUaVuNAo

I think about Oblivion and it’s NPC scheduling far too often. It feels like the missing piece in otherwise amazing games like Deus Ex MD or Pathologic 2.

I remember MGS V had elements of this. Guards would patrol, be relieved at certain times, there was scheduled transports of prisoners and resources. If you knocked out an entire base of guards at night eventually the morning shift would turn up and start waking them up, putting the base on alert.

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Rain World has this but for ecosystems. There is a whole dynamic predation hierarchy that changes according to how dangerous you are known to be or how much you have tamed certain creatures, there are tribes of intelligent creatures that you can trade with or fight with or be attacked by depending on the reputation you develop with them over the game, there are food sources that cannot be repeatedly visited but must be rotated through to give them time to regrow.

‘River Town Factory’ is enjoyable. It combines stardew valley with… I think factorio? The game with all the conveyer belts and factories that automate shit for you.

It’s got a bit of the wuxia element to it, some simple combat, some life Sim, some light puzzle mechanics, and even some optional tower defence.

‘Hero’s Adventure Road to Passion’ is also enjoyable too. It’s a sort of isometric turn-based wuxis rpg where you take a weak peasant and turn him into a martial grandmaster or probably die trying.

Way out of date vs your request, but MMOs have this to a degree, in Everquest for example some npcs/events only happen at certain days or times of the week, then there’s actually people too you can watch and maybe even interact with. Its something to see all the differences on each server’s community, different unspoken rules, economies, etc. One of my favorite things in MMOs is to fuck with their markets once I’m high enough level to do so, its remarkable to see how like IRL it makes people’s behaviors change and can either alleviate or cause drama.

Oblivion was supposed to use way more radiant AI then it ended up doing a lot less since the engine couldn’t handle npcs having full lives (even to this day AI overload is a thing for modders to think of), and AI would be busy stealing food from each other and dying horribly to the psychic guards .