There's a lot of NPCs you can talk with that will give you a location on the map to go to and a reward for completing the objective, which is typically for clearing out an outpost anyway. Like Lug Nuts where an NPC told me the location of a nest of mutants to clear out with a massive one at the end. Drove to it, but got caught in the middle of a Goon/Immortal Shrouded shootout where they were killing each other but happy to also shoot at me, went through the tunnels shooting mutants and faced the big guy at the end. Was a pretty decent side mission even though I clipped through the world at one point and needed to restart a checkpoint.
But the majority of NPC dialogue is overly long and means nothing in the long run as there's no real twists in their story. Like a guy told me his grandma was a ranger and asked me to go convince her to move in with him because he was worried about her. Found her, Ranger body hidden by light environmental puzzle, she dead. And that was it, no going back to tell the grandson she's dead, nothing else to the story, her body was just part of a checklist of collectibles and the NPC dialogue existed only to point me in the right direction and was waaaaay too much talking for what essentially meant nothing.
What cracks me up is for how bad the writing is overall, they must've had a super bored writing intern that they weren't sure what to do with because of all the unneeded named characters that sound like they came from a pro-wrestling name generator (Bruise Armbar is my current favorite), all the way too lengthy lines of dialogue, and that the junk you find is almost all named. Someone went through and named all the junk even though it's all worth the same amount and represented by the same graphical box.