Much like how Cities: Skylines is a spiritual successor to EA’s SimCity franchise which had been underhanded and abandoned, we’ve desperately been lacking alternatives to EA’s monumental greed with their life simulation “Sims” franchise.
Thankfully that looks to be changing following the announcement of “inZOI”, developed by the South Korean studio known as KRAFTON, if you’re thirteen and are accustomed with Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, this is the company responsible for PewDiePie saying the forbidden word.
Developed with the Unreal Engine 5, inZOI is more or less The Sims but with an autistic amount of dedication towards realism both in terms of world design but character design as well.
Krafton showed off the game during G-STAR 2023, an international gaming event in Busan, South Korea.
Originally known as “Project Blue,” inZOI was in development by the subsidiary Bluehole Studio. In 2022, KRAFTON acquired the project through a business transfer from the same studio. With abundant resources under KRAFTON’s ownership, the development advanced significantly.
Normally when I say that a game is desperately trying to focus on “realism” it’s almost always a bad thing, when western developers want their games to be more “realistic” it’s usually a buzzword for producing “cinematic” games that are lifeless, dull and play like a movie. Realism also means making female characters appear batshit ugly such as to appease woke mobs of those who live on Twitter 24/7.
Not the case with inZOI thankfully, judging by its gameplay demo the South Korean outfit, KRAFTON are truly dedicated to making a realistic life simulator reminiscent of The Sims franchise but on a much larger scale.
inZOI’s character design is both realistic and yet simultaneously not hideous rubbish made to increase ones ESG score, there’s no goddamn excuses for western developers anymore, it’s entirely possible to design realistic depictions of female characters without resorting making them masculine and manly.
The game includes intricate character customization and the option to craft decorative items. Housing features enable players to construct walls, set up windows, furnish rooms, and cultivate gardens with plants. The trailer showcases the evolution of interpersonal relationships in the game, encompassing romantic bonds and conflicts between in-game characters
inZOI allows you the freedom to manipulate the world and your character both in terms of appearance but also how they go about their livelihood, the trailer showcases many characters freely roaming around the city, with various activities such as working as a convenience store clerk, office desk jobs, firefighting and even working as a fast-food shit kicker.
You control your character’s entire life, though whether or not you’ll be able to construct your own “painting goblin” is yet to be seen, the gameplay experience expands far beyond the confines of your own home, as you can ventures out to clubs, gyms, internet cafes, game centers or immerse yourself with artistic endeavors like street performances.
The presence of these elements draws parallels to the well-loved life simulation game “The Sims.” which has since fallen down to such an extent that EA fails to actually innovate or incentivize new players with the franchise, rather they’re contempt to continually milk them with overpriced DLC content packages on a constant basis to their existing audience.
Much like everything else built on the Unreal Engine 5, it’ll be more of a shock if inZOI launches in a completely stable fashion, with acceptable framerates and hardware requirements, but I highly doubt that given the current landscape of video game development where the most important aspect about game design seems to be laziness.
Just about every single major game released this year has had severe performance issues, including immense stuttering if they’re built on UE5, mainly attributed due to the lack of actual optimization in the form of various models featuring excessive tris with zero retopology, overusing texture maps on unimportant objects among various other things.
All of the above essentially overloads your hardware with excessive geometry, making the game immensely demanding resulting in piss poor framerates, such as how Cities: Skylines 2 launched as the worst optimized PC release for 2023, failing to incorporate dynamic LOD levels.
Character models that you aren’t even able to see are being rendered with full sets of teeth, excessive tris combined with zero culling equals your system’s performance being raped.
inZOI on the other hand is immensely detailed, in terms of its world design, interior design where just about everything from chairs to paintings to potted plants would make The Sims cry out of embarrassment, especially when viewed up close.
And obviously the character design itself which looks unbelievably compelling and realistic for lack of a better term.
inZOI is immensely detailed and immersive, in terms of its character design, interactions and the world itself, that’s a lot of geometry and if not properly optimized it’ll undoubtedly be immensely difficult to run even on modern high-end hardware with questionable performance.
The gameplay trailer specifically was specifically uploaded at <30 frames per second to try and hide the sketchy performance of its gameplay, it might still be in development but I hardly doubt the performance will change drastically from this to release, despite being capped to <30 FPS on the gameplay trailer even I could notice performance issues mainly when viewing character models up close specifically.
At this point there’s no actual release date planned, it was mentioned that this game has been in development for at least over a year up until now but I wouldn’t expect anything until the latter half of 2024 at the earliest.
But even still this is certainly one title that I’ll keep my eyes on, because I simply want it to be the catalyst to drive a fire under EA’s ass by rendering The Sims franchise obsolete not only in terms of fidelity but hopefully enjoyability and content as well.
