You see: A thread.

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TychoTheItinerant

First time out of the vault
What kind of magical prescience must modern video game protagonists have, to automatically know the EXACT name of the perfect stranger they've just bumped into at the market? Simply amazing. Why, I remember the bad old days when I actually had to give an NPC more than a passing glance to discern their identity.

*You see: A heavy-set man.*

Isn't that AWFUL? I mean, it's so time-consuming. Especially when you want details, which everyone knows don't matter anymore in games.

*You see: A heavy-set man with an ugly scar running down one cheek. He's wearing a faded and torn uniform of some sort, with a nametag on it that says "George".

Pssh. If I lived in Tamriel I would have known his name was George before I even noticed the scar and uniform. I could just run on by and yell "Hey George!" and he'd be all like "*insert scripted response here*" and we'd go split a bottle of booze and make jokes about minorities! Good times!

Right, now that that's out of my system...

Why the hell is it that in SO many games you can automatically put a name to every passerby without saying so much as a word to them? And they're not wearing nametags or running around yelling "MY NAME IS GEORGE" (usually) either. Same goes for any other object, living or otherwise, which you have NEVER in your life encountered before. Now, you could argue that with some objects/creatures "This character already knows what that is because it's common knowledge amongst the people in the game's world setting", but that can only go so far. How the hell does your up-jumped chainmail-clad sword swinging farmer-boy-turned-knight-of-vengeance know that the freakish decidedly un-natural creature bearing down on him is a "Dagnabian shh'kkn'nz devourer" and not simply an "OH-MY-GOD-IT'S-HUGE-AND-HAS-LOTS-OF-POINTY-TEETH CREATURE-THING"? And what about that "Chthonian darksteel yataghan"? How the hell did he know that it was more than just a "curved sword with a black blade"? Seriously. Did he stumble across some huge magical codex while you weren't looking? Must have been during that one cut-scene about 5 minutes into the game, the one where his house was burning down. Yeah, I'll bet that's it. Damn, my character reads pretty fucking quick.
 
It's to let the player know what that characters name is...

The Player Controlled Chracter does not know the name of that character until initiating dialogue...

At least, this is true in some of the RPG's I have played...
 
It's partly because of the shift from text to graphics.

In a text-based game, the cue, "You see a heavy-set man," becomes useful info because the phrase remains specific, while not giving his exact name. So, you can ask the smith down the block about the "heavy-set man."

In contrast, in a graphics-based game, like Oblivion for instance, how are you going to ask the smith down the block about the guy you passed on the street? You may get a dialogue option to ask about the "heavy-set man," but what if in your mind you were thinking of him as "that guy with the funny-looking hat?"

Text-based description both allows for scenarios like above AND leaves the visuals up to your imagination. Graphics-based exploration might delight your eyes, but it skimps on the text and the imagination.

Misteryo
 
Once NPCs react in a believable way to some random person walking up to them and asking them strange questions, I'll start worrying about that.

As has already been stated, it's a metagame mechanic there to make life easier for the player rather than representing the character's knowledge. Removing it would be fine as long as it improved the gameplay but as I stated above, there are bigger issues with character interactions than psychically knowing NPC's names.
 
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