Yu probably didnt add them since he didn't want a ton of NPC's you couldn't talk to running around I guess.
This.
I imagine he wasn't at all too happy with the budget restrictions that limit conversation to only the store owners and not the random npcs. It has always been a thing of pride and respect knowing almost every character in Shenmue 1 and 2 you could interact with and they were all voiced, and characters had their own daily schedules. Now thats less of the case; in Naiowu at least.
Plus, a thing with this game that kinda annoys me is the npc pop in. Sometimes I'll enter a shop and wonder "where the hell is the store clerk?" and boom; he or she just magically appears out of thin air because the game finally decided to load the character model (or show it at least)
It was there in Shenmue 1 & 2 but not as prevalent as this game has it which is odd to me because Unreal Engine 4 should be able to handle that fine and its not like this game is super open world like many others.
So I'm imagining how this would then be if there were even more NPC's in town.
Perhaps PC modders will make a mod for this since PC's have the potential obviously to be more powerful than the PS4.
This also makes me wonder if this game will run any better once the PS5 drops and if it indeed is backwards compatible like they mentioned. Will the PS5 make that problem go away? Will load times be non existent? (since load times is something Sony is marketing that the PS5 will improve greatly on).
I know in the PS3/360 vanilla retail of Sleeping Dogs, npc's were kept to a minimum which felt odd considering its supposed to be Hong Kong.
But when the definitive version of the game came to PS4/XB1/PC. the number of them were expanded.