Thanks for the comment
Daz3D could very be the base for all the Any NPC blends, but still the license for game development is not perfectly clear…I guess I’ll send an email directly to them explaining what I need to do and see the response…anyway the price is much better then the 3d scans of people, which are bloody expensive!
Yes, the skeletal rig is based on the ART plugin from Epic, and I intend to add some more features to the base mesh, such as proxy bones for clothes and fat physic movement ( inspired by the amazing Judith Simantov The Last of Us tech demonstration and the brand new Uncharted 4 tech demo, so there will be a couple of variations for the skeletal rig itself in order to use the proper one for each character…also breast physics ( ala Witcher 2 ) will be implemented 
Still lot of stuff to check and still some RnD is necessary, but the base layer is now done, so it’ll be just a matter of adding content and make it the best and more efficient way possible.
Facial animation is something which I really would like to work in the future, and for now lipsync is just the beginning simply because the results are pretty good and, as said, facial animation is quite expensive, so I will also add a complete expression set for the face ( blend shape based, but I already developed an additional system which uses bones as well ) in order to have proper facial expressions with amazing results…
Also I’m re-learning Zbrush ( had to switch from Softimage to Maya, its still painfull ) and currently the next demo will be way more polished and will show off also a very nice trick, which is Dynamic normal map based on expressions
The video looks like ****, but it gives the idea…also the fast way to achieve that is via Blend Shapes, but I also found a method to use it with traditional joint based facial rig.
Lots of stuff to do, lots of things to test and lots of stuff to learn…hopefully by combining all of those things something great will come out 
No skin on Golem? interesting approach, I’m really curious to see the progress on that