This is a huge no and downvote from me and I hope the dev team doesn’t go through with it.
If people want small loading screens it should be optional for them to turn on themselves in the settings menus, and not something to make the rest of us suffer for, in what we have come to know Inzoi to be open world and no loading screens. I feel UnrealEngine was chosen for a reason and it’s like people are trying to reduce it’s power and potential of what this game could be for changes like this as more and more requests like this keep popping up.
Two seconds depending on your hardware and other factors. It’s not about the loading screens per se, it is about how they break up the game so it is not open world any more.
Besides, they would not necessarily be doing this so that we could have our vision of nightclubs or anything else, it is merely in response to many players or would be players complaining that they do not have the hardware to handle the game well.
Proposals like this come from the suits, not the devs, and are not for our benefit, or game content. They are principally about selling more copies, and making more profit.
Since Inzoi needs to focus on optimizing the game, I suggested an idea for making certain buildings closed off without loading screens—while still keeping the world open.
In the first screen, we’re simply standing outside the building.
In the second screen, we enter the building.
In the third screen, the interior begins to load—furniture, NPCs, and other details. There could be a clock animation to indicate that the building is being loaded.
In the fourth screen, everything is fully loaded and we can see the interior.
This way, there’s no visible loading screen at all.
In this example, I’ve already demonstrated how the entire building can be loaded without actually entering it—for example, if the player suddenly wants to see what’s happening inside.
I think they are already considering it. From Part 2 of the Q&A: For players to watch neighbors’ lives up close, lots would need to be directly connected—but that creates significant optimization challenges. However, we’re exploring a possible solution. One idea is allowing you to see neighbors’ yards and exteriors, while keeping the insides hidden. This approach builds on the optimization work we’re currently testing, where unentered homes are hidden or unloaded to reduce system load.
If a top-tier CPU (like my 7945HX, for example) can load it in 0.1 seconds and I don’t even notice it, then fine.
But please read carefully – what they’re proposing goes beyond just loading time. If it’s instancing – it’s essentially the suspension of simulation on all lots except the active one covered under loading time. Everything outside gets frozen, and the system redirects focus to the current lot. If it’s instancing, then it’s nothing like Sims 3, where the facade simply drops and all simulations across the city remain active. This is exactly Sims 4. There was even information that Sims 4 intended to remove loading screens within districts.
So, if they restructure the logic this way, that’s a dealbreaker – the game goes off the list.
Honestly, I don’t see what’s wrong with this approach. I don’t think they’ll go the Sims 4 route and split the city into separate loadable zones. I believe what they meant was freezing the simulation inside a specific area—specifically the building itself, not entire lots like in Sims. Everything inside the building stays inactive until the player starts interacting with it.
My method is essentially the same as what they described. For example, in my case, the police station also remains inactive until you enter it—only then does it begin loading everything inside..
Well done! When I read that Kijun said he struggled to get his project approved, I thought maybe these changes go against the original plan.
That would be a real shame.
Oh, what you’re describing allows Zois to exist off-camera, but we don’t know whether inZOI actually splits simulation into layers to optimize performance. Graphically, yes, but simulation-wise, it’s unclear.
It’s possible that all 255 Zois are somehow involved in the simulation every tick, or maybe those off-camera are offline (with logic processed asynchronously / via trigger), or aren’t simulated at all… There’s no visible routing logic – Zois seem to respawn rather than follow persistent paths (in contrast, Sims 3 maintained full routing for every sim across the entire city).
If everything worked like in Sims 3, there’d be no issue (even though Sims 3 ran on x86, single-threaded, and with just 3 GB of RAM..) If that were the case, they would’ve said something like “let’s close off the facades and stick to rabbit holes”… but… they seem to be proposing something far more extreme – and that raises questions.
From previous posts, everything I’ve been able to track down:
Before v0.3
As far as I’ve been able to determine (and I’ve been honestly tracking Zois), the game generated roughly 150–155 NPCs that represented the active simulation. They circulated through the city and respawned to stay close to the player.
Meanwhile, all staff and visitors were regenerated from scratch with each restart. I couldn’t find their names in the Karma Report – for example, Surf Shop visitors like Dave Ferguson, Nicolette Franklin, and Gilbert Brock disappeared permanently.
After v0.3
The game can generate nearly twice as many (up to 255?) NPCs as before that represent the active simulation. These NPCs both:
• circulate through the city in areas where a cluster is currently loaded,
• perform city-scale staff and visitor roles within active areas. BUT! In the newest lots, roles aren’t assigned at all — the game invites you to populate them manually via an experimental function.
It would not be so bad if this approach only applied to new lots introduced to the game - as you say, large and populous buildings - but I fear from what I have read that they intend to replace existing lots with instances. That would mean that potentially any community lot would require a loading screen, and some are extremely small, eg. the shops.
If the main consideration here is making the game easier to run on low end hardware, which it seems to be, then every interior will be instanced, possibly including your own home. Deal breaker for me.
Maybe there were already hints about this at the Meetup and I just didn’t realize the whole impact
That maybe all these shared features are instances meant more loading screens and less open world
Also here about the ‘small independent spaces’ and ‘overcoming lower-spec optimization issues by utilizing these smaller spaces’ (=instances & loading screens)
That would be probably a huge mistake. Their core players stopped playing TS4 because of glitches and loading screen. If inzoi is going that route, I’m 99% sure it will be the end of the game.
I was thinking about making a post, but since there were already a few posts in the wishlist, and since I thought my post probably wouldn’t get more popular than the ones already made, I decided to just drop them here in the comments.
But now, after what you said, I kind of regret posting them in the comments.
Seriously, why should those of us with high-end rigs have to suffer just so the game can limp along on low-spec machines?
We’ve been down this road before with Sims 4 — remember the whole ‘runs on grandma’s toaster’ thing? Enough already. Technology moves forward, not backward.
If your PC can’t handle it, just lower the graphics settings. We want to play without loading screens, not be dragged back to the Stone Age.
I’ve gone through so much, and realized just one thing… all 300 Zois (!!!) in the set (whether on screen or not) are being actively simulated (every tick = frame in UE? … omg). There’s no evidence of stand-by layer with deferred logic (i.e. no system that offloads inactive entities to low-cost background until needed). That could be either an ambitious design choice or a limitation of the engine itself, which might not be capable of artificially deferring off-screen simulation or staging… That’s why we need information from them about the underlying reason.
