I haven’t been active in their Discord lately, sorry, It’s just much more convenient here. Honestly not sure where to post so it actually gets seen.
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This seems like the obvious solution if it can be done, no loading screens necessary, just keep roofs and walls up and all the inner activity and objects do not need to be rendered. More realistic too, I do not wish to see through my neighbours’ walls in RL!
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UPD: please read carefully – what they’re proposing goes beyond just loading screen or 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.
In the current version of Sims 4 it’s actually worse – that same lot from B&H is open and visible to the second family/household, and yet, the business won’t function. Why? Because instancing doesn’t just freeze – it disables simulation logic even on lots that are technically loaded but not “owned” by the active household. So you’ll see the building, but the systems behind it – customers, staff – will be “dead.”
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I think this is the approach that would satify both side more. I hope the devs take notes!
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This is concerning. I hope they open a brainstorming thread soon on discord so that we can discuss this openly. If that happens, please do share all you’ve shared here in this thread over there, for I think it would be a win for everyone if they listen to you.
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I started this and I expect everyone’s support.
I don’t want to see any loading screens either. I already find it slightly annoying we sometimes get a loading screen when switching between two zois at different lots. That’s the maximum amount of loading screen I am willing to take.
It’s not even about the loading screen or 2 seconds of waiting for me. It’s about the nature of an ‘instanced’ lot. Instanced lots only function when you’re there with your camera and zoi. Meaning that if you go out of it because you want to control another zoi in your household that is back home or somewhere else in the world, you’ll leave the instanced lot and it will most likely become ‘frozen’ or rabbithole-esque until you go back there again. This is a nightmare for anyone who wants to seamlessly control multiple zois that are in different places in town.
Please look to Sims 3 for inspiration instead. Sims 3 has many features that make it so the entire city isn’t fully simulated at once, but it still feels like a seamless open world experience. I can send one Sim to the park and the other sim to the café and only those two lots will be fully loaded and simulated in while the rest is in a partially-loaded (low-render) stand-by mode. Please look into solutions like that instead of instanced lots hidden behind loading screens!
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I completely agree. It’s what gives inzoi its soul and heart.
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If I could give a hundred likes, I’d give them all for this one post! It’s so elegantly concise and spot-on — hats off. Just a few lines — and a complete breakdown of Sims 3 simulation basics, plus a clear expose of the catastrophic implications behind instanced lot design 
I’ve added everything from this post as solid arguments.
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Absolutely this. Federica has posted the exact same thing on another thread about this topic, and it is not so simple as just “waiting 2 seconds”. Instanced lots break up the open world and utterly change the game.
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Esatto! Io gioco con famiglie numerose e quando passo da un membro all’altro della famiglia che si trovano in diversi lotti mi aspetto che gli altri continuino a “vivere la loro vita”, gestire interazioni ecc., non che restino congelati.
Io scrivo ogni tanto su Discord, ma spero che gli sviluppatori leggano anche qui, altrimenti perché creare il forum?
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I started actively researching as soon as people began insisting it was “just a loading screen,” and the counterarguments started fading in front of “just wait 2 seconds!”. It became genuinely dangerous once that consensus on Reddit began quietly spilling over here. This isn’t about supporting author posts or anything like that – it’s about making sure everyone pauses, even for a second, to consider what real problems might emerge before the voice of 1k players overrides the experience of the other 1.5M who bought the game, and possibly the game’s future itself.
Most people dont have the first clue about what it means to develop and a game and what actually goes into it. However, the actual developers do.
I hope that the devs do whatever they feel is best for the game and their future plans as opposed to what a loud minority seems to want. The rest will just have to get on board. You cant both have the cake and eat it. If loading screens outweight the cons, so be it. Cause so far, no loading screens mostly has cons. You want a sims 3 style absolutely no loading screens empty town? Sims 3 is still always an option
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Sorry, I’m an active developer, and one of the key stages in my workflow is final optimization and polish – down to occlusion culling, draw calls, overdraw, render distance, hitting target FPS across all platforms, identifying 1 sec, 0.1 sec. performance drops, input lag (latency), overall and per-object per-texture etc. memory usage control, streaming pool management, and more. Optimization requirements always come with one condition: no loss of gameplay experience or visual quality. That’s the core of this work. And to achieve that, we use a lot of tricks the player should never notice, because it’s not their problem.
You can’t claim to know the majority or minority, because 1.5M people invested in the game by purchasing it in early access, based on its initial USP. Out of those, only around 1k are actively participating in discussions, meaning any “sample” reflects just 0.05–0.1% of the actual investors at best. It’s perfectly normal for people to support development and quietly wait for release – especially since early access usually means the game already has a defined core and basic content, and the remaining phase is focused on polish, balancing, and content additions, not fundamental changes.
UPD: Yes, I did the research, and inZOI appears to be the first early access title that tends to undergo fundamental architectural shifts post-launch, despite having a declared USP and a sold build, that contradicts the core principles of early access.
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Hello, As the owner of this topic, I have a request from you. You can share your opinion with the Inzoi support team. And the Inzoi team will get back to you within the day. And you know that via mail.
Bye-bye, open world! Even those who invested $2–3k into high-end setups for next-gen gaming — we’re sidelined too.
especially since we also want inZOI to run on lower-end systems, such as those using the M1 chip
6. Technical Issues & Systems
Maintaining the Open World
Many of you strongly opposed the idea of adding loading screens or dividing lots to improve performance, expressing concern that such changes would damage inZOI’s greatest strength — its seamless open world.
This is honestly the most difficult topic to address today. There are two major technical challenges in maintaining an open world:
CPU performance, required to sustain persistent simulation, and
GPU performance, needed to render large, complex environments.
Keeping the open world active makes it nearly impossible to fill the city with more stores and activities while maintaining stable performance — especially since we also want inZOI to run on lower-end systems, such as those using the M1 chip.
To balance these challenges, we’re focusing on optimization — reducing city and lot sizes so inZOI can run even on very low-end hardware, and developing technology that works on devices without Nanite support.
My direction is to use instanced (dungeon-like) interiors for optimization — allowing us to add more stores and content without sacrificing stability — while still maintaining an open-world experience. If we don’t use this method, we simply can’t continue expanding the open world with more interactive places. This decision wasn’t easy, but I’ll make sure the sense of immersion remains intact and continue searching for better solutions.
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Oh no!
I guess this decision comes from the pressure to sell more copies
(Following is from the AMA Q&A Part 2 on reddit)
and their smart zoi contract with NVIDIA -.-
That’s the downside of funding with sponsors.
I could easily live without complex NPCs if that meant to keep the open world.
This makes me really sad 
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I posted on Discord, I understand that building a seamless world is an extremely complex task. But I’m convinced there are other ways, like splitting the simulation into active and dormant zones and layers within one massive seamless world. What kind of dungeon-like design is that in the most ambitious life simulator of all time, the only viable option for those who want to build a personal world that can behave like a real one?
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