inZOI First Preview: Beautiful and Full of Potential, but Still a Little Empty

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In inZOI, Krafton’s ambitious all-in-one life sim, you’re not God but an all-powerful office worker who handles HR in miniature worlds under the watchful eye of an adorable feline overlord. In addition to managing the needs and relationships of customizable avatars called Zois, you can build a metropolis of custom homes, businesses, and public parks. A host of complications, like city-wide mood sliders, weather patterns, and potential wild animals, fuel your all-seeing agenda, leading to a grand simulation of addictive chaos. It’s a grand, powerful, systems-heavy world that still feels a little empty for now.

Before I jumped into the deep end of my first day on the job, inZOI introduced me to a sophisticated, hyper-realistic character studio that, if time had allowed, could have easily consumed my entire preview session. There was a lot of pushing and pulling as I warped my avatar’s facial symmetry with incredible freedom, like a child making a attractive monster out of clay. But any true attempts at creating a stylish virtual self disappeared when I came across all the Zoi presets other creators had made—nightmarish recreations of cultural icons like Shrek and Handsome Squidward. “We want to give[players]as much freedom as possible,” explains Hyungjun Kim, director and producer at inZOI. “I grew up creating custom content and created a lot of custom content when I played The Sims,” they continued. “I know how players feel and I’ve been in their shoes, so I wanted to give them as much freedom as possible to make their lives as easy as possible.”

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You’ll choose your character’s gender expression, age range (child, adolescent adult, adult, middle-aged, and senior), and personality before diving into inZOI’s holistic anatomical art salon. “We initially considered styling it like in The Sims, but we thought making it realistic would help players engage more,” Kim says. “I wanted people to look at life in a more serious light, and if I have one vision for this game, it’s that I want people to live meaningful lives and really think about life in general.”

“We want to give (players) as much freedom as possible,” explains Hyungjun Kim, director and producer of inZOI.

The inZOI fashion pack is a powerhouse of customizable streetwear and accessories. I could pick a cute top or skirt and customize its length and color with a rainbow palette, easily recreating some of my favorite vintage fashion aesthetics like McBling and Indie Sleaze. The inZOI’s sizable wardrobe is refreshingly contemporary and mostly androgynous. “We reached out to clothing companies and brands when we were making the game,” Kim explains. “We asked a clothing designer who has worked with a lot of Korean singers and K-pop artists to help us, so with their help we could create our own style,” they concluded.

There is one unfortunate problem with inZOI’s Generative AI integration, though. Players can upload their own design, which can be applied to their avatar’s clothing or toys, using a variety of built-in presets. However, a separate button opens a prompt box where you can enter word salad and receive a synthographic digital pattern based on your request. While this isn’t all that surprising given current tech trends, it does ruin what I found to be a compelling and inspiring character creator. The inZOI community would be better off if everyone were forced to show off their unique visions, design skills, and cultural backgrounds to create and share chilly textures for other players to exploit, rather than letting a machine do the innovative work for them and produce pathetic work.

Unfortunately, there is one problem in this room: inZOI’s integration of generative AI.

Once I had completed my home, I was dropped into inZOI’s Seoul-inspired city of Dowon, ready for my digital self to blend into this impeccably dressed world. It was here that I could begin to see the seams of this ambitious project. inZOI’s open world is huge, but feels very early on. It’s full of intersecting people, places, and activities, but despite so much to do, there’s a haunting emptiness in the background that needs to be fixed before the game’s full release.

Starting in my Zoi’s recent apartment, they’d be hanging around their gorgeous apartment, cooking frittatas and chatting with their roommate. Communication in inZOI is divided into Love, Friendship, and Business, and once you start talking, you can switch between the different categories, pushing the relationship in the direction you want. All the while, the Zois would converse in a speech style similar to Simlish, which was created specifically for the game. “We have a language for inZOI, for Zois,” Kim says. “We have a language for Dowon, and then we have Bliss Bay, which is based on America, and we need a language for that. But the problem is, if you’re using English or Korean, you have to get voice actors and voice actors,” they continued. “And if you localize English to Korean, there can be a lot of difficulties, so we created our own language. It’s written in Korean, but the voice itself is just independent. It’s just a language that exists in inZOI,” Kim explains.

At first glance, it’s a compelling set of interactions, even if the movement sometimes feels abrupt and awkward between activities. The physicality of Zoi’s animations often makes up for this – I was charmed by the way they received and cracked gooey eggs into a bowl. As my Zoi wandered around the house, he took a few selfies before spending a lot of time on the toilet – perhaps that frittata was a mistake. In any case, it was time to take my Zoi on the road, so I headed out of my apartment to see what was outside. In the open world, my Zoi could traverse the length and breadth of the city with almost no barriers. I could also instantly tinker with the environmental settings, turning my pristine and clear landscape into a post-apocalyptic nightmare with a few clicks. Even if I occasionally found myself weaving in some textures, I was impressed by how freely I could shape Dowon and torment the people in my world – and how intuitively I did so.

To balance out the total freedom you’re given, the friction in the inZOI comes from the Karma system, which tracks your Zoi’s actions and punishes them when they do bad things. Making a social faux pas like littering or stealing can cause your social standing to drop, and other Zois may start gossiping about your misdeeds. I’ve also “secretly farted” in the kitchen next to my imaginary husband, which almost certainly had an effect. Many inZOI seem boundless and determined not to bother you, so I was pleased to see clear boundaries to consider, even if the specifics of these systems were still a mystery to me.

I could also instantly change the environmental settings, turning my pristine and clear landscape into a post-apocalyptic nightmare with just a few clicks.

With time running out, I took a moment to try out the build mode, filling my Zoi’s space with unorganized assets. By going through a bunch of menus, I could easily reposition doors, build recent walls, and add pre-made furniture. You can also modify the open-world environment in a similar way. “Our build mode isn’t finished right now—it’s only 80% done—but our rendering is pretty good,” Kim says. “I have big ambitions for the build mode. I want the player to be able to build tall buildings with dozens of stories,” they continued. “We might add terrain editing later.”

You can also change almost every detail of the furniture, from the type of wood to the sheen you want, or upload one of the aforementioned custom textures if you want. This seems like a great foundation for criteria-based building challenges, and I’d love to try and furnish a low-budget or small-footprint home using the available mechanics. Kim told me that in the future, the team will be watching what players do with the tools and trying to preserve that as much as possible. “We have an Unreal Editor that you can download from the store, and you can modify it with that,” Kim said. “And we’re not going to interfere in any way.”

But before we think about the future, we need to focus on the experience of playing inZOI now. The game’s world is incredibly attractive, but a bit empty in motion, saturated with a lack of grounding lore. At times, it can feel like a playable version of a high-end real estate render or a perfect Pinterest board. It leans toward a playful narrative with its cat mascot and AR company structure. Still, it doesn’t bring the same magical, realistic charm to its more minor interactions, giving them a sense of meaning or humor. But we’re still a long way from the full game, and I hope it manages to carve out a confused corner of this fascinating and challenging genre, a space ripe for the kind of innovation that inZOI plans to develop.

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