What if there were non-quest specific world-changing events in Skyrim? I mean, I dont want them all to be permenatly world-changing or completly world-shattering, but I want events that add a twist to just wandering. Like, if theres a storm, you'll see a crashed ship the next day. Maybe it has some valuable armor thats not going to be avaliable in stores for a while. Maybe it had pirates in it, and if you save them a nearby town will have new shops the next day. I want something to add a little life to just being bored and wandering. I want towns and forts to get over-run by bandits. I want kidnappings to happen in towns.
How would this work out in game?

scriptedly

This is a cool idea. I'm not sure how implementation would work of course. Something I was thinking about the other day that fits in with this was that it would be cool if carnivorous wildlife fed on dead bodies. For instance, you're walking down the road and there's a bunch of crows on the bandit you killed some days back. Or the bandit isn't there at all, because some bear dragged his remains off to its den which you may or may not come across sometime later.

the first step would make it so creatures will actually move around the game world on their own, instead of just spawning whenever you load the cell and milling around their spawn point until you kill them.

That could be fun, but I would be concerned that it could seriously interrupt the flow of game play. Particularly if towns keep getting overrun by bandits, it seems like you could go off on a quest and return to find that the quest giver has been killed or the town captured and you might be stuck. That is certainly how it really worked in the ill-fated sci-fi MMO Tabula Rasa.

Scheduled NPCs can die during their travels. Scheduled ships can sink too if a storm has physical effects. I would love that. I don't like leveled lists for spawns, I think there should be inter province spawns of bandits, caravans, ships... Food chains for creatures.