It has been our understanding that upcoming life sim Inzoi will release in early access this year, but there hasn't been much in the way of hard confirmation, and unless the earth's orbit slows down considerably, 2024 is nearly over. At a game demonstration this week, however, a Krafton representative confirmed to PC Gamer that the plan is still to release Inzoi in early access before the year is out.
The life sim genre is in a liminal sort of stage at the moment. It is obvious to everyone that The Sims 4 shouldn't be the only game in town, and that the genre's huge audience is ready for new ideas, but actually getting a Sims successor or competitor out the door has proved complicated. Paradox life sim Life by You was canceled right before its planned early access launch, there's uncertainty over what the next Sims game will really be (it's not The Sims 5), and Paralives isn't expected until sometime next year.
If Krafton really drops Inzoi before the year ends, it could benefit a lot from being the first big Sims competitor to make it to market.
The immediately obvious difference between Inzoi and The Sims is aesthetic: Inzoi's soft lighting and pouty lips set it far apart from the flatter, more expressive but less realistic Sims. After trying out Inzoi's character creator, Lauren said that "it's so beautiful that it's easy to slide into same-face syndrome."
There's more going on than pretty faces, though. Some of the features promised by Life by You before it was canceled can also be found in Inzoi, like an open world with driveable cars and on-the-job tasks. We saw those things in action in sponsored videos back in August, which Lauren picked out the most notable details from.
At this week's press briefing, Inzoi game director Hyungjun Kim said that the goal set by Krafton is to update Inzoi for the next 20 years. Later in the briefing, he said that he thinks it will take over 10 of those years to achieve his full vision for the game.
"I think it has a lot of improvements that can be made. For instance, we need more cities," Kim said through a translator. "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."
If all goes as planned, that 20 year run will start before the end of the year. Inzoi will be available on Steam when it launches in early access, and no specific date has been set yet.
