One thing bothering me about the game is how every NPC you walk by in a town feels like spouting something off to you, even while you may be engaged in dialogue with an NPC about something important. I'd rather just talk to an NPC to hear what they have to say rather than them trying to shove it down my throat.

One thing i DO like however is NPC banter between each other.

If there's a way to just stop them from initiating dialogue directed toward you when you walk by them, or they walk by you that would be great.

I have found several alchemy stations and enchanting altars that are impossible to use without a nearby NPC walking over to you, stopping there, and incessantly talking at you while you're trying to work.

Maybe a good compromise would be making it more random: sometime they will talk, sometime not.

Yeah i'm wondering if there's any way to distinguish from a necessary dialogue interaction and just random nonsense with the NPC's... i hope.

Definitely agree with this. And I'm writing about this kind of thing in my own mini-review:

No super zooming when talking to a character... when choosing to initiate a conversation, you can walk up to someone to a comfortable distance, and start the conversation. But if characters initiate the conversation with you, they'll do so as soon as they reach a certain distance from you, which in my opinion is definitely too far away. Other characters nearby who are talking randomly will be louder than the character you're trying to listen to. And characters will pass by you and start talking to you, distracting you when you're engaged in a quest conversation with a character.

Quest-related scenes will play out in front of you naturally while other things continue to happen normally in the world around you. Only problem is, other characters who are nearby will wander up to you and start telling you their random bits of conversation, and they'll be louder than the quest-related scene you're trying to watch and listen to.

if you got the pc version you can use the console command

TDetect - Toggle AI Detection (You can steal all you want and no one will see you, doesn't work with pickpocketing) 

We'll the problem seems to be that NPC's think that the player is approaching them when you're actually just walking by them. This would be appropriate in some cases, but it happens too often.

I have also noticed characters being louder than characters that are nearby. I also have a problem sensing the direction of sounds, which probably has something to do with the volume of the voices, but it could be my speaker setup.

I was just thinking about this today. I think it would help if they only said something to you if you look at them first. Not sure if this is possible or not, though.

Yes yes yes... Annoying.

Game developers need people like us on their QA teams.

Lol apparently none of you have lived in a really small town, I did for a year then moved away because random people would just walk up and start talking to me.

Difference is that in this game, the NPC's don;t recognize that another is already talking to you and they will start yapping away regardless