I think eve would have benefitted from some more npc flavorings around stations and docks, if only for eye candy? Just to see the little people scurrying around your docked ship loading and repairing would have added so much immersion...
They are doing a fairly complex sort of 'sims' AI giving a few million npcs jobs and tasks (trading, hauling, etc) and letting them be the cogs in the player universe. So when you steal some haulers cargo that will generate a new npc task to deliver the same product or an npc/player bounty mission on you. Supposedly.
A lot of the missions you will get from the standard agents but a lot you will have to overhear convos in bars, etc as chance encounters. They are trying to find ways to encourage players to spend time in the landing zones and not just run to the jobs board, etc... We'll see. One more week for citizencon which will be their biggest set of reveals yet.