I always thought it was too easy to walk through a shop front door, past the shopkeeper and steal everything from his backroom/chest without him knowing anything, you just walk out right past him with your bag loaded with his stuff.
Same with guard towers and such to steal everything from their armoury.
I think in the future it would be good to have the ability to make npc's follow you through an interior if they see or hear you . Somewhat like Oblivion does it.
Some establishments have guards (ie Meldor), in this case the guard should follow you.
Still though a lot of buildings have back entrances you can go/pick through and not be seen or followed that you can go about the business as normal.
This would be definitely affect game balance (in a little way) and should probably be a mod. But the "shopkeeper" AI would need to be able to open the door to their counter and further navigate through the building.
Also I don't know that MW AI has a non-hostile, non-companion following ability, so that would need to be possible.
Interior npc AI that will follow
Re: Interior npc AI that will follow
Yea, this would be for a mod to do. However, OpenMW would have to implement some sort of function that would allow an NPC to follow the PC if line of site is broken. I would think the simplest thing would be a tick mark in the NPCs settings, this would avoid needing to run a script.