moztacular

To add my two cents, after about a year of off and on attempts to get into the game I finally got a good character going for about 2 months now and see the good potential of everything. I do agree NPCs are really this games best option for increased survival challenge unless they decide to break lore and create some "special infected" that could pose more serious risk. If anyone has played State of Decay, I think that game had a wonderful if flawed system of side activities that gave the player opportunities to venture out into the world to rescue NPCs from your camp, retrieve gear, recruit a new member to your group, etc. I'm not sure if Zomboid will be robust enough to let you have a base with friendly NPCs that you can manage (think the walking dead governor/Woodberry scenario), but it would provide additional challenge if you received radio calls for help or supply requests that you could accept or ignore based on what you feel like doing. This would force you to head out into the world rather than stay holed up on a rooftop. Furthermore, if you can indeed have named NPCs living in your base, I know that I would personally become invested in keeping them alive and would definitely go rushing out to save someone if I got a radio call that one of my favorite buddies was stranded out in town somewhere. If they added NPC children and such you could get a nice TellTale's Walking Dead scenario where you could be trying to take care of a kid only to have him/her wander off or something and you desperately going around trying to find/save them...to me that'd be super exciting and provide lots of emergent gameplay opportunities. Running through the streets carrying an injured comrade, unable to attack the horde following you would be tense and fun (in my mind!) It would make the game "harder" in the sense that you would be putting yourself more and more at risk, but this would require NPC and AI in general to be very robust; if you go out and rescue someone, they had better be able to navigate their way back to base with you or on their own.