I really hope this feature makes a comeback (especially for the poor victims of the boss native), or even gets extended; rescuing prisoners taken from other villages, interrupting a monster "taking" a girl, and so on would make for some memorable random encounters if the devs balanced their frequency semi-decently.
Having put a substantial amount of time into the game at this point, I do hope that the devs keep at this for a while. More animations covering a greater range of NPCs is the obvious and essential thing, but I also really hope that we also see an extension of the non-gimmicky/jokey options for building villages, clothing natives, and so on. It's a bit hard to build a village with a distinct identity; your options are either a fairly limited variety of "appropriate" stuff or "Oh, it's made of cactus/spiders/Christmas magic/etc.".