It works flawlessly for me on Qwen 3.5. Are you trying to talk to the NPCs in a language other than English? Some players seem to be doing that, and it completely breaks the AI because it's not a supported feature.
So, before that, I was using another model that generated text pretty quickly. But as I realized, the problem was with it. So I deleted it and started using Qwen 3.5. But apparently, the previous model was the one that broke the NPCs. As soon as I started a new game, I was able to buy a house from Gareth on the first try. So, everything is fine, and I'm just a dumb person. If you're interested, the fast text model was Tiefighter.