I’ve been meaning to write this for quite some time and will try keeping it brief.
When my brother and I just discovered this game we were pretty damn excited about it. We had not spent a heap of time reading up on the forums yet and the ingame tutorial was (is?) a little outdated and sparse. We kicked off at 0.5 iirc and I wanted to share with you what the one thing was we were the most excited about.
We found, through literally hitting every key combination on the keyboard, that there was a menu listing factions and we found a menu for missions. At this time we did not realise that you need to activate NPC in the options and for 2 days straight (over a weekend) we spent hours sharing ideas on how to find other survivors, to then maybe join a faction and get stuck into the missions.
Even though we were convinced that these factions and missions would be cool as fuck, this was not the awesome part. It was strategising about how to break into a radio tower to get communications equipment, how to find a hill or mountain to build an antenna, or build a rudimentary tower to fit an antenna, after we figure out how to train our electronics/mechanics/fabrication etc skill up high enough. How to build a radio etc etc basically: How to make contact with other survivors to then…
… start on the quest in search of these survivors while trying to stay alive, fighting off whatever we face along the way while scrounging for food and drink and then to finally meet up with a faction and what then? Maybe it’s a faction of bad-asses that lured us into a trap to take our shit, maybe even enslave us… after all friends are few when days are dark…and how much darker can it really get? Maybe it’s a religious zealot faction, a bunch of weird ass extremists praying to aliens and shit. Or a white knight faction etc etc. Maybe they are very welcoming, maybe they are apprehensive, maybe extremely protective and you need to prove yourself first.
This was our first impression of what the NPC’s in the game might be about and to be honest, I still hope that when NPC’s get revamp it’s not just a revamp that fixes their bugs and enhances interaction, but a revamp that spices up their function in the game to something like we expected when we just started playing.
I’d love to hear what you guys expect(ed) from NPC’s too.