Conversation-Focused Game

I've been deeply focused for the last few days on version 4 of a long-running game idea: something where you mostly talk to people instead of fighting. Not as in "there's a battle system but you can click a thing to say you talk your way out of killing". As in, "you walk up to NPCs and have something resembling a sane human conversation with them".
-V1 of this idea was based on my frustration with the Institute plot in "Fallout 4". In this demo you click on people to receive bits of evidence about FO4's Synth slaves, then go to a debate screen where you click on the evidence to counter specific arguments being made by a villain. Eg. the villain says "synths can't be creative!" and you can click a fact you found about a synth seen carving interesting designs into its arm, which strengthens the "creative" argument in your favor, gets a bonus for countering what the villain just said, but weakens your case for "synths feel pain".
-V2 was about having a conversation flow instead of the PC walking up to someone and saying "QUEST. LOCAL INFO. SHOP. BYE." The actual things being said are abstracted into "topics", and there's a notion of topics being related. If the NPC talks about Raiders, you can continue discussing Raiders or shift focus to Guns or Mutants, but the NPC gets annoyed if you suddenly talk about Science. You gain XP in the topics being discussed.
-V3 was about gaining specific written facts like "The Collapse happened 100 years ago." At this point I was moving away from Fallout-specific lore but keeping the concept that you're an outsider coming in to help an allegedly-good science foundation, the Thaw. In this demo you had to gain facts (canned text) from a teacher, then tell these facts to a robot, but to get the teacher to talk you first had to spill the info you already had on other subjects to gain favor.
-The screenshot is from V4 in progress. Looks junky with crude sprites and tiles. As shown here: As hero Pip, I knew nothing about Raiders. I used a doorway to "go outside" and have a (purely text) adventure, which granted me a Fact about Raiders and unlocked the topic for my conversations. I walked up to an NPC and clicked on the Learning menu, then the topic Raiders. I asked about Raiders. NPC knew nothing about that. I stated the fact I knew. NPC didn't care (not having it in their list of interests), but learned it. I then asked for info and the NPC was able to repeat what I'd said, then to recognize when I was repeating myself.

The idea here is that I'd link some mix of persuasion, conversation flow, and learning, with a simple adventure mode. Go outside to gain knowledge and resources that you then spend inside to build up trust and more skill and equipment, which helps you outside again. Then in the end you talk the Thaw into not unleashing Project Gratuitously Evil or something.

It's not full-out AI, but I see the potential here for a kind of gameplay I've never seen before, if I can keep it simple enough to avoid massive scope creep. A full V4 demo is... kinda close given recent progress. You'd have an ugly sprite walking back and forth between the "go outside" doorway, a bed, and several NPCs to talk with, who offer different help if you butter them up. As for making this into an actual game I'm not sure what the final form would be. Probably would need a simple battle system (I've coded several) and a simple world map (ditto) but not a complete 2D tiled world.