InZOI’s director was disappointed the new life game isn’t as silly as The Sims
InZOI’s director was disappointed the new life game isn’t as silly as The Sims
As a longtime The Sims fan, InZOI director ‘Kjun’ admits it was disappointing that the new game’s realistic style makes goofing around hard.
My brother in Christ, you made the sandwich
The Sims isn't even as silly as The Sims anymore. Busted out Sims 1 a few months ago, that shit is fucking bonkers. Absolutely nuts. It had a daring whimsey that games just don't really have anymore.
I've been replaying old PS2 platformer classics like Jak & Daxter, Tak, Sly Cooper etc.
Tak has pretty funny humor, if a little childish at times. And it may have not aged well in general (all white people voicing possible island tribespeople that practice a magic/religion called Juju), but it's still fun and was pretty inventive back then with the cartoon proportions and interactivity with the animals throughout.
Everyone still loves Jak, and a lot of it is due to the art style. Everything in those games is so alien and yet also kind of familiar, but the way they mix the mystical with the sci-fi always intrigued me. It's kinda like Shadowrun imo.
Playing Sly, I realized there was an abundance of anthro characters in the early 2000s. But the games took inspiration from cartoons and comics and leaned into those aspects and aesthetics heavily. There's always a sound effect and sound bubble that pops up when you knock out a bad guy, the colors are vibrant and over the top and the stories are too. They live in a weird magical retro-futuristic world with laser guns, jetpacks, super-geniuses able to create mutant monstrosities, immortal cyborg owls that run on pure hate whose body parts can then be repurposed into a multitude of uses (hypnotization, perpetual engines, etc), and so on.
Video games used to be about fun.
Video games used to be about fun.
Couldn't have said it better myself!
All the weird, off the wall, "who cares, we hope it makes money, but we're doing it anyway" feel is gone. Get a bit from the indie space, but a lot of gaming feels like "what can we put out that'll get us literally all the money?"Going from old Ratchet & Clank games to the new ones will give you tonal backlash
I'm a bit surprised about the coverage of InZOI so far. You'd think that the extensive use of generative AI would be driving a bit more outrage, going by how the Internet has treated the issue when it comes to Activision recently. Or the extreme amounts of jank, while we're at it. People seem... reluctant to appear to be defending The Sims, I suppose.
I think people are really clamoring for some competition to The Sims. I feel that way myself.
But a lot of what I've seen of the game so far indeed feels so uncanny and off-putting. The generative AI feature I saw demonstrated in a video I watched, the texture generator, also seems like a huge step down from the Create A Style feature from The Sims 3, which I sorely miss.
I see how some of the weirdness in InZOI is in "so bad it's hilarious" territory.
I am not an anti-GenAI zealot, myself. I actually think a few of the ways they use it there are perfectly valid and make sense to support user generation... but are almost certainly a moderation nightmare that is about to go extremely off the rails. Others are more powerful than Sims on paper but the UI seems bonkers and borderline unusable.
I can see the idea of wanting another Sims successor, or both a successor and a competitor, but it's hard to see the treatment as anything but hypocritical at this point. If anything, I think it shows that there is a reason why there is such a gap between The Sims' success and how many viable competitors have surfaced. Turns out The Sims is REALLY hard to get right. Even Sim City, which feels more complex at a glance, was much easier to clone or improve.
I think the reason most people are okay with it is, firstly, because it runs locally, not on some massive datacenter somewhere.
Secondly, the type of AI used is either not generative; for the "smart Zoi", feature, where it's basically just an AI driven NPC logic system; you tell them what they should act like in a prompt and it informs what they do and why, taking it a bit further than their basic needs.
Or, where it is generative, it's within its own ecosystem. It's generative, but for its own consumption, rather than polluting the general web with garbage content like most generative AI is. If this causes their own ecosystem to be drowned out with garbage, it's their own problem solve, not ours. They have a financial stake in keeping that ecosystem healthy to engage with, since I believe it's a source of monetisation?
I've played the game for a few hours, but unfortunately I've aged-out of enjoying this type of game I guess. I used to be a big Sims fan, but neither that nor Inzoi grab me as it would have 20 years ago.
Those goalposts are moving at supersonic speeds, man.
"AI driven NPCs" are just chatbots, and generative AI is generative AI. I thought the issue with GenAI was supposed to be that the data for training was of dubious legitimacy (which these models certainly still are) and that they were cutting real artists, writers and developers out of the workforce (which these by definition are).
Nobody seemed to be particularly fine with Stable Diffusion when that came out and could be run locally. I guess we've found the level of convenience against which activism will just deal with it.
Which, again, is fine. I don't have a massive hate boner against GenAI, even if I do think it needs specific regulation for both training and usage. But there is ZERO meaningful difference between InZOI using AI generation for textures, dialogue and props and Call of Duty using it to make gun skins. Those are the same picture.
I don't think my computer can even run the game, the high requirements are the biggest headscratcher for me. One of the appeals of The Sims, at least 1 and 2 (maybe 3?), was that they could run on comparatively lower powered computers of the time, which greatly helped with sales
emergency-patch an oversight that allowed children to be killed by driving into them when in a car.
So, you can kill people with your car, but not kids?
Tried the game, its alright but don’t really know what to do within the game besides making characters.
There's no content. It's just a fake family generation simulator.
I would really like to try this game but it kept crashing on my Linux system. :(