(This is from my post on reddit)
Lets say you got a survivor that you have been surviving for a long time and you want to create a new one.but you don’t want to remove him you can chose the “Retire” option which deletes him but turns your character into a NPC. then in the options you go to a new option “Edit retired characters” and that allows you to edit your characters personality. After you change their personality and other options there is a chance that that character would spawn in as an NPC in a evac enter or a randomly in the world. then you could upload them and other players could download them and have them in their game.
Note:
The character cant become a follower the player gets a message saying "Sorry fella I prefer being alone…"
If the character dies in the world they wont respawn until the world is reset.
If the character has NPC following them when they are retired they would be following him/her when you retire them.
NPCs can’t form teams yet and won’t be able to do so for a while.
Turning a character into a NPC sounds doable.
How about a separate faction at least?