Not necessarily for Episode 1, but I hope that in some future Episodes, some NPC's will be able to respond as well as the Alicebot can (http://alice.pandorabots.com/). The dialogue system of Shroud is perfect for such AI capabilities. Ideally, each NPC will respond according to his or her own unique personality and experience like an Alicebot, but it's probably too much work to program all of the NPC's with such fantastic AI. Perhaps a compromise is to give great AI to a few key NPC's (such as the Companions of the Avatar, or maybe the Oracle), or maybe all of the guards can respond the same way.