You remember Oblivion from back in the day. It's worse than Morrowind in a lot of ways but the real-time day-night cycle and the NPC movement was engrossing. Quests where you have to go find people, and they can be in tons of locations are so interesting. Sometimes you have to figure out when someone goes home, Idk. Also characters would occasionally exhibit quirky behaviours. Every subsequent Bethesda game diminished this aspect hugely, it's one of the things I hate about Skyrim most.
Another series where the games never hit an early height of world sim again is Pokemon. Gold & Silver introduced day and night cycles that would have NPCs appear or disappear, wild pokemon encounters change, radio stations come on or off, certain items show up. For a system with 32kb of ram, it slapped. Other games have the cycle system but it's easily the most pronounced in G/S/C.
The "life sim"/'you are a loser farmer' genre as pioneered by Harvest Moon (and now happily overtaken by Stardew Valley and its ilk) have always had this kind of system, and I do like those a lot but if a game's not "about" its scheduling, it seems like they're more likely not to have it nowadays. STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl and its sequels had day/night at least, Metro did not... So if you know of any recent games that have really cool scheduling or realtime or day/night mechanics, hit me up. Also don't say Cybertruck'd 2077, game is boring and stupid :)
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.
Not in the strict literal sense yeah, because Bethesda has never been good, so it's all schedules. But they put in the work to make it seem like the world was simulated, and it would often add flavour and the world did in fact move when you weren't there, things went on. Also I know "radiant ai" is fake but you do have things like M'aiq can go look for calipers, and he can go anywhere on the map to get to them. They can do stuff. Proper simulation of hunger levels or whatever probably would have been easy to add, but it's not about literally simulating people, it's about simulating the idea that the world moves on its own, I guess.
This is why I think fhings like Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing or indeed Dorf aren't what I'm getting at - if you stop interacting with the townspeople or your dwarf fort, things will stop functioning pretty quick. Whereas Hoothoot always only comes out at night regardless of your input, and certain Skingrad residents will always visit the skooma den even if you're just standing around 24/7. I wanna find interesting things happening, I am forever fascinated with the Living Desert mod for New Vegas.
Kenshi is actually a decent answer since a lot of its faction stuff is very organic and lots of funny things can happen out of your view.
Makes me think of Majora's mask. Instead of a single night/day cycle, a 72 hour repeating cycle where certain quests where you had to talk to one person at a specific time range on a specific day to causing someone to be at a specific place at another time, and so on. Even OOT had a basic day/night cycle, but MM took that idea much further. Far from a recent game though.
Even the kinda bad 3DS remake is almost 10 years old
Ay that was the game that brought this on, I was watching Rosencreutz' video on Majora's Mask. It's very cute, I dig it.
I did greatly enjoy coming across some bizarre scene out in the desert where clearly something had happened because everyone was dead, but it'd be like a faction from the other side of the content and there'd be no evidence of what happened to them except one unimpressed, slightly injured goat.