InZOI: Roadmap Thoughts

As someone who has grown up playing various life simulation games, it’s always interesting to see new ones launch. More so, the fact that each one brings something new to the genre.

One that is very much on my radar and I have spoken about before is inZOI. This upcoming life simulation game is planned to be released at some point this year and is from the South Korean company Krafton. This is the same company who are behind the popular Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds.

A few days ago, the inZOI team shared a new roadmap video on YouTube. This gave us a more in-depth look at what the team has been working on, as well as their hopes and plans for the game. It looks like there is a possible second part to follow at a later date.

inZOI Roadmap Overview Part One

The thirteen-minute video goes in-depth and covers many different topics, as well as answering some popular community questions. While the original video was released at the end of April, the inZOI team released an English-dubbed version for the community to watch over the weekend.

Promising Developments

Since inZOI made its way into the community late last year, the game already had a lot of promise. With so much detail in the game already, the community was waiting to see what other ideas and features the team had in mind for the game.

What Was Showcased?

The roadmap video opened with the reveal of cars and how they will work. The team made it clear it wouldn’t be like how cars are in Grand Theft Auto. It would allow you to explore and invite people to join you on your journey. The inZOI team went on to discuss that there is a chance you could get into car accidents but didn’t delve into too much detail regarding that. They did showcase a way that the game’s autosave feature could also help go back to a previous auto-save and essentially allow you to stop situations like that from happening.

Cars were something that was highly requested on the game’s Discord and the team went on to say that you will be able to show off your cars and customize them amongst other features they are working on.

Next up, and again, another highly requested feature is Group Activities. Now, there are so many ways these seem to be implemented into the game. From small gestures such as holding hands with a close friend or singing karaoke with friends, playing board games, grabbing coffee and dancing amongst some of the ideas featured.

The way the team showcased the relationships feature was interesting. It’s not just your standard relationship, there are multiple layers and factors that can contribute to various relationships. Positive or negative, relationships will play a huge part in inZOI.

We also got to see a sneak peek at the sliders that can have an impact on how successful or unsuccessful certain relationship interactions.

Relationships moved onto Reputation. Much like in real life, your actions can and will have an impact on how you are perceived. Again, this is another interesting feature when it is integrated into the game.

City Edit will be such a fun feature to play with. Being able to make changes to the world around you, be it using YouTube videos on the billboards, adding and removing smaller details, the weather and more will be so helpful. Customizing the world to make it truly your own and work with your stories.

However, the game will also allow you to set the levels/frequency of certain situations, such as fires and crime rates.

Will there be Mods and Custom Content?

The easier answer the inZOI team gave us is yes!

What I liked about this was the transparency from the team on this topic. Yes, there will be an option to add them to the game, and they are currently working with another agency to make the process of creating player-made content easy and seamless. Of course, there are more details to come on this topic in the future.

Naturally, this led to another point and showed a hub for in-game player-created content. From the characters, rooms, lots and furniture, it looks as though it will work similarly to another feature of another highly popular life simulation game.

More Activities and Dreams

The team then spoke more about activities, more specifically, late-night activities. This is something that isn’t really looked into in great detail like that’s being shown in inZOI as other life simulation games. It’s nice to see that you are free to explore the world of this life simulator at any time of day.

That being said, the Dreams and Nightmares feature, does sound interesting, especially with the sleepwalking feature that’s become a part of the sleep feature.

Heading to the Studio

The Studio feature looks amazing. A customizable location where you can take screenshots of your characters. However, the detail of how much customization from setting up your backdrop to even your character is outstanding. I think this will be, to date, the most detailed life simulation game we’ve seen, especially for character creations. Now that is another point for another day!

What are My Thoughts?

Well, needless to say, this is one of the games I’m highly looking forward to. The level of detail and customization, even at this stage, is amazing, and I can’t wait to find out more about the game.

I’d love to see a character customization demo, although I’m not sure if that is something the inZOI team are planning on doing or not but fingers crossed for that one.