Sims Competitor inZOI Will Be Released in Early Access by 2025

KRAFTON representative reportedly stated that life sim inZOI, which is considered a major rival to Sims, might launch in early access this year. No other details on the release date or window have been revealed.

InZOI was announced at the end of 2023 and was immediately proclaimed a rival to the Sims franchise, which has been the most popular representative of life simulation games for the last two decades. In April 2024, KRAFTON shared a gameplay trailer for the title. As seen from the trailer, screenshots, and players' gameplay videos, inZOI indeed might present competition to the beloved life sim, as it features a range of new functions and fantastic visuals with complex mild lighting and a soft color palette created in Unreal Engine 5. However, entering this niche seems to be rather difficult. For instance, the life sim Life By You was canceled before entering early access.

inZOI also features a variety of character customization functions. Players can create diverse characters, inventing not only their appearance but also personality. With a character creation demo that was released in August, players recreated their favorite celebrities and characters, such as Billie Eilish, Britney Spears, Angelina Jolie, Timothée Chalamet, Taylor Swift, Michael Jackson, Harry Potter, and more:

The stunning character customization is not the only interesting feature of the game, as the developers offer a wide range of other advanced capabilities that will interest life sim lovers. One of them is adding emotions to the characters' faces with the motion capture tool that works on a smartphone – you can just point it at your face, and your Zoi will mimic whatever you want. Another feature of the game's visuals is a 2D-to-3D generator that turns images into 3D objects with AI. Also, a function that Sim players have been waiting for is drivable cars, which the developers discussed in more detail in a gameplay trailer.

Producer and Director of inZOI Hyungjun Kim said (via PC Gamer) that Krafton intends to update the life sim for the next two decades: "I think it has a lot of improvements that can be made. For instance, we need more cities." He shared that the developers wish to expand the game's world to make players' gaming experience as enriched and interesting as possible: "We want to create as many cities as possible to help people experience different cultures and different countries, and I want people to have urges to create things to be able to create everything they want. I want maybe other games to be inside our game and actually to function… and I want to put in as many features as possible that creators could use."

Before, Hyungjun Kim shared that in his career, he had mainly focused on MMOs and had become tired of that genre. The developer also revealed that his son asked him to create a successful competitor to The Sims, and that sparked his idea to make a peaceful life sim.

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