Hi There,
I am reaching out in response to the answer you gave during the Reddit Q&A event regarding the open world concept.
No, no, no. If inZOI had a loading screen, this game would lose its soul. The main feature that distinguishes inZOI from the Sims series is its seamless, open world. Abandoning this concept would make inZOI feel like just another life simulation game, and that would be a huge disappointment for your community.
We absolutely do not want a semi-open world. The open world concept is not just a feature—it is the foundation that makes inZOI unique and exciting. Adding loading screens would completely destroy that immersion.
Yes, we understand that performance challenges exist, but players would much rather see optimization improvements or smarter technical solutions than the loss of open world freedom. Please do not sacrifice the game’s identity for an easier route. This is a very, very important issue for us.
The open world should absolutely not be sacrificed for any reason, unless it were possible to have some kind of option for those who have less powerful hardware. For those of us who do not encounter any performance issues, let us play in the open world that we expected from the beginning.
Turn this into TS4 and I will lose interest immediately, and I am sure I am not alone in that.
I completely agree too.
I stopped playing The Sims a few years ago.
I bought Inzoi from EA because it promised to be a Life Simulator, yes, but different. The open world is one of its key features.
I’m starting to believe that player feedback is a double-edged sword.
The game must have its own vision, innovative and powerful, and carry it forward. It must offer something players don’t even know they want :).
Then, on many issues, the opinion of gamers is certainly important, but it must be part of this vision. In my opinion, obviously.
In the Sims series I started with TS3 and loved the open world. When TS4 was designed as a world divided into many separate segments so it could run on phones, I gave up on The Sims. Never bought TS4, never will.
If inZOI heads in the same direction, I’ll drop it too.
I think you need to choose appropriate, smaller-scale town locations which will work within the technical limitations of the game engine. It’s never going to simulate a bustling densely populated metropolis, despite the devs’ admirable attempt with Dowon.
By comparison, I find Cahaya a joy to walk through in the shoulder-cam 3rd-person viewpoint. More compact scale, more complex “texture” of the environment, and a level of NPC activity that seemed appropriate for a smaller town (the resort island seems rather sterile by comparison). OK, maybe too many motorcycles at times.
All this to say that I hope inZOI continues to push the boundaries rather than falling back on a “safe” development path. Cheers!
Let me repeat this once more here: they shouldn’t be shifting responsibility or framing this as a trade-off with players. Players aren’t developers, they don’t know 0.01% of the code, aside from the Data Assets visible in the modkit. Many players aren’t even present until release, they bought Early Access based on the USP and calmly wait for launch, unaware of what’s being changed behind the scenes. That’s an enormous responsibility for the entire audience, placed on the shoulders of a tiny, vocal subset. I’m sorry, but I can’t trust players to act as developers. That’s not their role.
I had proposed reexamining the simulation model in collaboration with specialists in this field (and I’d repeatedly suggested that in various brainstorms) – perhaps inviting people from Epic Games and exploring proxy-based logic and/or Mass Entity System team (Mass AI, Crowd, Movement, LOD, etc.). Of course, if they’re attempting to calculate dozens of individual Zoi agents in active simulation, there will be problems. And spawning? What spawning? In Sims 3, sims arrived at lots via rerouting, yes, sparsely, but that was back in 2009 on x86 machines limited to 3 GB of RAM. Even with those limitations, Sims 3 simulated around 150 agents across multiple layers – active, as households and workers, simplified via LODs with routing, and offline asynchronously and through Story Progression. They weren’t respawned, they transitioned between layers. Computers today are 5+ times more powerful, so what’s the justification for a simulation downgrade after 16 years of hardware progress?
One of the suggestions they had was to make cities smaller so they could have more npcs but people don’t want the cities to get smaller and actually consider the ones we have now as small
Alright, we can consider a proven method for loading/unloading simulation zones — used in many action games, including GTA IV: “Bridges” or transitional sctructures. While you’re on one side of the “bridge”, agents on the other side remain in a non-active simulation layer.
These transitional structures can take the form of physical bridges, highways, or other connective zones. By stitching together multiple segments this way, and leaving only baked geometric LODs in the distance, you won’t compromise immersion in any way. In return, you get seamless locations — like a residential district, a suburban estate, a Hollywood studio, a concert arena, a hospital near Bliss Bay, and so on.
You could take a short drive via taxi/bus or your car while the next simulation layer quietly comes online, or wait a second as you move through a teleport. Either way, it’s still Bliss Bay, it’s still physical presence, and it’s still a lightweight simulation.
Take any past-gen action game, for example, Watch Dogs 2. As you drive across bridges or highways, or water surface, another part of the city quietly comes online in the background. It’s a rough approximation, but it feels close like a large central city and its smaller satellite zones.
Please Keep the world open! Im here, playing Inzoi, because I dislike sims 4 closed neighbourhoods, gameplay and gfx. Inzoi: Open world, great customisation, beautiful gfx, great creativity tools! Inzoi has it all and it “could” be a sucessor of the mighty sims 3!
Its 2025, people have phatt computers, nay people require phat comupters, in order to run Windows 11.
Windows 10 is being depreciated soon, so most folks will need to move to win11 and upgrade their computers.
As for console players, yeah do what you want mate. If you want to make Inzoi with load screens on console, fair enough, but not for computer users.
1000% Agree with everything here. We finally got what some of us have been dreaming of for decades: a open world and running on the most powerful engine known in gaming, that can give so much future potential down the road, if we let it. Like this is literally a dream and the thought of it being taken away for a semi-open world. Could not only lose players it could make others think how and “where is this game going as far as being its own unique experience”?
The main reason I left and as others have expressed within this community was Sims 4 was a regression from Sims 3. We didn’t like the semi-open worlds, no cars, no building, no CAW, no soul, no realism. Inzoi gave us this finally.
I beg the Inzoi dev team not to listen to this suggestion of making the world closed off in parts with loading screens. Give options in settings menu for those who don’t have the PC specs to run this game as intended, but leave the game as it is for the rest of us who can run it and don’t have issues please.
I’m glad to see someone mentioning Watch Dogs 2! I’m hoping Inzoi dev team makes a world this big to enjoy in the future WD2 was so seamless of an experience and it’s what I hope the same for here.
Edit: Is there any way to get NPCs to spawn in a huge world that’s on the same level as CyberPunk 2077? Because yeah those are just NPCs being simulated and not families, emotions, jobs, events, etc. but surely something is available that doesn’t compromise needing to make a smaller world to have more NPCs simulated with lives at the same time.
I still don’t understand why all NPCs need to be loaded into full simulation. What’s the point, if most of them are just ambient noise? Why not implement simplified LODs within a certain radius so that at a distance, they route like dummies under a unified scenario puppeteer, and off-screen they simply progress asynchronously over time? Or build a hybrid crowd system with cached puppets and bulks, managed by something like the Shepherds system from AC Unity, then extract a puppet from the bulk during interaction and swap it for a full NPC (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXT0nHy_rLE). I wrote about this six months ago, and later Epic Games introduced some derived animation logic in Witcher 4 on UE5:
Of course, the idea that people want fully autonomous NPCs is unrealistic, your machine will choke on 20 of them on screen.
And that’s why Small Cities get scrapped? Why? Just attach a few autonomous districts to the main map with seamless streaming, so the player can live in a lightweight zone and visit the center when they want — no one gets left out.
After playing through most top-tier games and seeing how new ones climb the podium with uncompromising solutions to give players the best, you start to realize: real gamedev is more like magic, so the player never notices the trick.
I agree in general that the open world should be kept, but I don’t see the need to have every building interior visible at all times in the overhead view. At the very least, residential buildings (other than the one you’re actively playing) should be closed off unless your Zoi actually enters them. As for commercial lots: obviously it’s useful to have some of them permanently open, like the central market and the small shops in Cahaya. But you could probably close off buildings that your Zoi won’t enter often or can’t usually enter at all, like the police stations, without really affecting normal gameplay.
I don’t believe this wasn’t considered. They have over a hundred qualified people (probably seniors too) and Sims 3 right next to them. And no one thought of it? If that’s true, it’s almost shocking.
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.
Ah, so it turns out the overall optimization issues are solvable, no need to stress the players In that case, If you decide to make a new thread with a quote from there, I’d be happy to support it.
And if the problems are more about NPC logic and routing optimization, there are still ways to handle it without loading screens. I think that’s where the real difficulty lies.
Can you share this topic I opened on Discord? I know that if they make the open world of the game semi-open world, it will be dragged into a very bad situation. For example, I won’t play it anymore. The thing I hate most about Sims 4 is the semi-open world concept, it is extremely boring.
In that case, If you decide to make a new thread with a quote from there, I’d be happy to support it.