I love PZ and the best experience that drew me to the game was the Kate + Baldspot demo, and the NPCs in one of those first demos. Kate was just a talking piece of furniture, and the bandit NPC was just on a set path: If baldspot moves, shoot him. If he sneaks up behind and shoots bandit, die. xD
I wouldn't be too surprised if we were surprised suddenly with rudimentary NPCs in a beta branch sometime before the end of this year, and I wouldn't be surprised either they took more months/years to really fine tune NPCs before they even let a peek of info out to the public. That's their decision as developers, and IMO they have given us a lot already. We have so many maps, mod support, sandbox options, multiplayer, vehicles, and new animations on its way.
My BF said something that got me thinking, video games in the 80-90s were at the quality of some of the broken-ass early access games on steam today, except they were full-priced. Games like PZ and other games with developers that continue to work on their early access, beta, and even some complete games give you updates, patches, new content, and all for free AFTER you have purchased the game at an earlier stage at half the price of a full game. I bought PZ years ago, and stuff I have never even anticipated is now in the game. I am really happy with PZ on the reflection of that, and have already bought more copies for friends/family.
With that said, even if broken NPCs are released soon for a small number of people to test and mess around with, it still would be a fun experience. Think of the NPCs in the Cataclysm DDA early experimental builds, people had fun and insanity with their various glitches.
But if they really get NPCs right I think they know that an explosion of youtubers will cover PZ, they will get attention, they will get a ton of new audience, and it will be worth the wait. Think of Stardew Valley, whose developer had a rudimentary version of the game done 4 years before release and took the time to really polish the game, before finally releasing, resulting in it topping many AAA titles in steam sales.
tl;dr It could be by the end of the year, it could be years, either way it will be worth it and fun
