[05.01.26] The Ultimate Celebrity Life (Updated)

[Kjun]

Hello,
I hope everyone is enjoying the new April update. While I was worried about many of our shortcomings, I was also happy to see that many of you liked the new features and improvements we were able to make this month.

We like reading your feedback to make post-update improvements in later patches, but sometimes, we like to collect your thoughts in advance on topics that are far from being released because we can use that insight to use our development time much more wisely.

So for this week, rather than showing you a bunch of new features right after an update, I want to use this week’s Brainstorm session to do as the series name would imply, and the topic I want to talk about is something that’s planned for at least half a year later.

It’s our celebrity system.

What does it mean to be a celebrity and to live a life after reaching that status? What features from inZOI that are currently available but also have yet to be added can we incorporate that can help you get that ultimate experience? Let me know down in the comments.

Obviously, we won’t be able to create everything that’s listed on this thread, but I still want you to share whatever comes to your mind when you think of this topic, even if it might not be replicable in-game.

Seeing where your imagination runs off to when you imagine these ideas helps us set some general directions but also depict important details that we can translate into our game, based on what possible within our infrastructure.

I believe doing this can create an end result that, while not exactly in the form you may have imagined, still gives you that feeling that familiarly aligns with what you were hoping to feel with this content.

As we are off for Labor Day tomorrow here in Korea, I want to leave you all with this post way earlier than you’re probably used to. I guess since I’m posting this at midnight, it still counts as a Friday post

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend, and I’ll see you all in my reply next week!

-Kjun

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Kjun’s Reply to Your Comments

Hello, everyone.

Yesterday in Korea was Children’s Day, which gave us a long holiday weekend. I was able to take a real break for the first time in a while. Even so, many of you posted so many thoughtful messages, and I spent a very enjoyable time reading through them.

This week, because of my question, many players shared a wide range of suggestions and ideas about the in-game celebrity system. You gave us many diverse opinions about the life of celebrities, fame, social influence, fandoms, scandals, career progression, and entertainment-related careers.

Since this week’s posts were about systems that have not yet been developed, the development team will carefully read through them and do our best to reflect them. For that reason, this week’s reply will be shorter than usual, and I would also like to include an apology.

Many of you said that the celebrity system should not simply be a fame value, but a complex system that includes fandoms, scandals, image management, and social influence. The development team strongly agrees with this direction, and we would like to shape future development around this idea.

There were also many opinions that fame should be obtainable through many different paths, such as becoming an entertainer, singer, actor, model, influencer, athlete, writer, scientist, or even a criminal. Many of you also suggested that fame should be managed across different levels, such as local, industry-specific, and global recognition.

From the initial planning stage, fame was intended to be a system connected to many other types of content, so I believe it can also be naturally connected to celebrity-related content.

I also found it very interesting that, as fame increases, elements such as fans, paparazzi, interviews, advertising contracts, fan meetings, VIP access, luxury housing, and bodyguards could become available, while negative events such as rumors, toxic fans, invasions of privacy, stress, and burnout could also occur. In particular, the ideas about paparazzi following celebrities were especially intriguing.

Some of you also suggested that fans could be divided into categories such as casual fans, devoted fans, and obsessive fans, and that fan clubs, fan events, social media activity, and conflicts between rival fandoms could create social drama. I think these are truly excellent ideas. Thank you.

There were also suggestions that fame could be partially inherited by children or lead to family scandals, and that players should be able to adjust the intensity of the fame system or disable it if they wish. I think this is also a wonderful idea. I believe inZOI should have this kind of depth and connection between content systems.

That will be all for today’s reply. I would now like to offer a sincere apology to everyone.

This month, we focused on stabilization and optimization, but while carrying out several updates, we made a serious mistake. It seems I am still inexperienced with this genre. As a player, I have experienced these issues many times, yet strangely, I still made mistakes during development.

When you visit a restaurant as a customer, you immediately notice if the food arrives late, if the seasoning is off, or if the plate is cold. But once I stepped into the kitchen myself, I realized that I was the one making those very mistakes.

To improve the game’s stability and performance, we upgraded the engine version from 5.4 to 5.6. However, compatibility issues with existing mods caused many crashes, resulting in significant inconvenience during gameplay. We still have not resolved every issue, but we are continuing to work hard on fixes.

I feel especially sorry because we are currently working hard on script mods, yet we ended up creating these errors. We failed to properly check this before releasing the build, and that caused a great deal of inconvenience. More specifically, the biggest issues were errors in the loading priority settings for mod packages and conflicts with older mod packages.

I deeply apologize for failing to fully ensure compatibility during this update. The development team is currently devoting all available effort to resolving these stabilization issues, and we will do our best to provide a stable environment as quickly as possible.

Taking this incident as a turning point, we are rechecking every part of our preparations for script mods. Going forward, we will handle script mods and their operation with greater care and caution.

Even with these shortcomings, I sincerely thank all of you for continuing to leave us your thoughts and feedback. I will see you again on Friday.

Ah… I took a break, so I do not have anything to show you on Friday… What should I do? Haha.

kjun

Discord - Group Chat That’s All Fun & Games

[Mazikeen]

Paparazzis might knock on your door . And they can take photos. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to open the door. Also there should be stars for celebrity levels 1-10. Only celebrities should be allowed in VIP areas. So that people who recognize us while we’re walking on the streets might want to take pictures with us. Let them gather around us

[NIck_Olay]

Tomorrow is also a holiday in my country: Labor Day.

As for celebrities, I’ll say right away that you definitely need to work out the mechanics of earning and spending money with her. Popularity is a lot of money. There is nowhere to spend a lot of money in InZoi. When you have a lot of money in the game and nowhere to spend it, it gets boring to play. This is a problem (95% of games have an economy), so for the system to spend a lot of money, and for the economy of the game as a whole, I suggest the following:

1. Items and objects of the game should be divided into the following categories of quality and exclusivity: cheap, standard or regular, premium and elite. (Beds, chairs, appliances, etc.) Accordingly, their cost should vary greatly depending on the category of quality and exclusivity (for example: from 100 meow - cheap to 100,000 meow or more - elite)
2. All things and objects in the game must have the properties of permanent wear damage without the possibility of repair. (Cabinets, tables, chairs, sofas, etc.) Now, only a couple of things are breaking: refrigerator, bathroom, sink, computer, they are always easy to fix - it’s not realistic and boring. The service life should depend on the quality category and exclusivity of the item (the higher the grade, the more reliable the item).
3. Develop a taxation system. The higher the income, the higher the tax. Also, introduce a luxury tax, so as not to buy up all the expensive things and continue to sit it is useless to save a lot more money.
4. I think the house as a whole should also have the property of permanent wear. Walls, floor, ceiling, roof - everything should deteriorate. And if the house is not repaired and updated for a long time, then make it possible for it to collapse. And for this reason, there should be a possibility of Zoi’s death + a fine not small from the city for creating a local disaster.

[Carnel]

Happy holidays!

I’ll keep this fairly brief: for someone to become famous, there needs to be some reason for it.

Most often, celebrities in reality are: actors, singers, models, and outstanding athletes. Then come various politicians, bloggers, artists, and writers.

So for the concept of “celebrity” to make any sense at all, it would be good to focus on developing precisely these careers. At minimum, film production, theater acting, and complex staged performances on stage should be present. And only through success in these areas will Zoi finally start to be recognized.

As for the implementation of luxury as an opportunity to display celebrity behavior, there were at least two good threads on this. Let me remind you of them—almost every message there is informative:

A DLC Focused on Luxury and Fashion and Fame

With love and respect to all of you!

[origins523]

For added luxury: I would love seeing the option to buy private islands and also the option to get employees like butlers, cooks, drivers and nannies etc. This could also work well with the criminal aspect where you could want to hire security or employ smaller criminals to start building an underground network.

For fame, to affect salaries and also gains from self-employment tasks and I love a good price ceremony for best actor / singer / sportler etc.

[anibea528]

Actually, celebrity life has been discussed quite a bit in separate threads. There were lots of good ideas there. On my part, I’d add that it would be interesting to introduce recruiters who scout for celebrities. They could appear in public places and stand out through their appearance or special animations. Under certain conditions, a recruiter could approach on their own and offer a promotion opportunity. Or we as players could try to impress them ourselves. I think this would be an interesting way to gain popularity.

And another important aspect would be how Zoe behaves after gaining popularity. Such a character’s animation should be different. After all, stars need to act appropriately. New interactions with surrounding characters. And the characters themselves will also react to the star differently. The more popular Zoe becomes, the higher the chance that they’ll be recognized on the street and pestered for photos and autographs.

P.S. We’ll have Labor Day too Happy holidays!

[NIck_Olay]

Yes. It’s going to be cool. You reminded me of the old forgotten but very cool game - The Movies.

[Mazikeen]

( Except for option 1. ) Personally i don’t want any of these . But it can be added as a kind of on/off option. Options 2, 3, and 4 are all terrible in my opinion. They make the game unplayable. They completely ruin my gaming experience. Excessive exaggeration

[DylanWalsh]

I would like to have concerts. I would like to create a celebrity like Hauser and play the cello for the audience. It will be cool to have an option to add our own mp3 music for concerts. It could be for singers and classical music players like Hauser. Also, dancers, popular group bands, and single singers. One of the best things we enjoyed about The Sims 3 was being able to customize the venue for the concert. Additionally, the celebrity’s physical appearance for the concert. A ceremony that recognizes their popularity, similar to a Grammy, would be cool.

[Samuriko]

To Kjun and Team,
Not related to the famous thing, but about the last update.

The UI change inside CAZ, where we can dress-up and design character is very bad.
I appologize to tell you this, but I’ve discussed it with other players that spend a lot of time in CAZ, and we all agree.

The fact we must keep looking left, then right, then left, then right… It gets really tiresome and outright bad for the neck. Granted, the old one did not have all the options that this one has, but can nothing be done to move all of it back to the upper right where it was so we can keep looking on that side, comfortably, to design our zois, their family, and their outfits ?

It would be nice if we could get the old one but with extra icons added as a thin layer at the top or something ? Even if that would mean sacrificing a line or 2 of outfits at the bottom.
Again, sorry to complain about this but the new CAZ UI is just bad.

Thank you for your consideration.

[NIck_Olay]

You’re wrong. I am a professional in economic games: Cities Skylines, The Soviet Republic, Der Planer and others. I can say that a lot of money makes the game boring. In the real economy, this is called deflation. Trust me, when you have 500,000 or 1,000,000 meows in InZoi without being able to spend them, you will abruptly lose the desire to play InZoi. Just like most people. In The Sims series of games, the same problem is, the family has millions without the ability to spend them all the time. Adding a bunch of unnecessary content doesn’t save it.
I’ve been playing InZoi since the Early Access release and I’ve never used Cheats for money, I’ve always had enough money for everything. I built a gorgeous house, bought all the most expensive things, and I still have a lot of money. Boring! Then the question arises: Why do we need careers and a celebrity system at all?
I recommend reading the 2005 The Movies game, where you can earn millions and find many ways to spend them (you need to spend them there - the game forces you to do it). Also from the series of games: My Summer Car and My Winter Car - the bottom line is that it’s hard to save money there, but it’s very easy to spend (you need to do it there too). These games don’t get boring over time as the economy is constantly moving.
And you don’t have to do anything in the settings, it should work automatically, so no one will sit for hours and figure out the game settings. This will also alienate the players from the game.

[Mazikeen]

Option 1 is quite good. But you’ve really exaggerated the others. This is a game. Personally i didn’t like any of the options except for the first one. If the things you wanted were added to the game it would instantly put me off. I want a relaxed game.

[NIck_Olay]

Speaking of celebrities, I remembered the series of games Test Drive Unlimited 1 and 2. The island, the beach, the sea, snow-white yachts, wooden fishing houses and against this background stands red Ferrari 458 or Scuderia - it doesn’t matter.
By the way, InZoi already has a local Honolulu - Kahaya. We just need to build a separate neighborhood for the rich and famous. They usually don’t want to live with ordinary people.

[NIck_Olay]

There are already games in The Sims series. Why else spoil one game with casual stuff?

[Mazikeen]

Except for the first option you suggested i’m pretty sure it could ruin the game. We want to play games not experience stress.

[NIck_Olay]

Let other players vote for or against it too. Then we’ll see who turns out to be right.

[Mazikeen]

I definitely say no. we play the game for enjoyment not to experience stress.

[Robert]

For me please oh please do NOT have it so everything stops while all zois fawn around a celebrity , It totally ruins my game if i am having my zois date and all the interactions drop while they run to stand around a celebrity ,

Let them be famous by all means with say special careers etc but dont make it so everything else stops ( like a certain other game where the DJ stops playing music to go stand and look at them ) ,

They need some reason to be a celebrity like a movie career or music idol maybe certain objects like a limo to ride round in , possibly paparazzi who spy on them and if they do something bad they lose status

[RestlessSloth]

I’d like to see zois react in a variety of ways to a celebrity. In real life, famous people with a great reputation don’t elicit the same response from everyone. Not everyone is a huge fan of every A-list celebrity. So if the celebrity zoi is at a concert, where everyone in attendance is a fan, they would crowd around the celebrity zoi. But when the celebrity zoi is walking down the street or getting a coffee, some zois would point and whisper to their friends, some would take a photo with their smartphone, and some would approach to ask for a photo or an autograph.