A Question of Comparison & Preference

[LittleBrownBiscuit]

Quick question:

Is anyone finding other lifesim style games too cutesy now?

I no longer like how the sims looks, it’s too soft and cartoony for me, and cosy games put my teeth on edge. I watch videos from gaming commentators and they will discuss these games on a regular basis, so I get some exposure to them. In the comments, inZOI is often brought up, with people talking about it being soulless and too realistic. I can’t relate to these comments as, after spending 100s of hours playing, going through generations with one family, starting from a single zoi and playing all the way through, those feelings don’t resonate.

When you’ve been playing for a while and watching the drama unfold, it doesn’t seem too realistic. In terms of visuals, there are filters to change the style. I don’t find the game soulless, either. I still have photos of my original zoi from August last year. I haven’t gone as far as printing them out and displaying them in my home, but I really liked her, she was so lovable. Her children are a mixture of her and their father and are, in their senior years now, still two peas in a pod. They’re always happiest together. Seeing their relationship and how they will ignore their own children sometimes because they’re laughing so much means that, for me, the game is far from soulless.

The parents

Baby Abraham

Abe the teen

Abe playing peekaboo with his daughter (ignore the nappy on the floor)

Family dinner with Abe, his 3 children and he sister with her son

Anyway, back to my point, I can’t go back to those other games. How do you feel?

[Starwing]

I straight-up don’t like the Sims, to be polite about it. I quit soon after 4 came out. I loved TS2 a lot, and there were things I liked about 3 (customizing things and the open world, for the most part). However, nothing could really recapture what I liked about 2, and I wouldn’t really like another game to do what that game did (it’s too wacky and silly) because I had to overlook a lot of things to make the most of my gaming experiences.

When it came to 3, we weren’t able to customize things anywhere near like we can with inZOI!! Being able to import my own images into the game, generate patterns inside the game, and be able to change the colours of most things is way better to me than being able to adjust different parts of patterns provided by the developers, as int he case of TS3.

There was a common complaint about TS3 that I also felt was the sims were lifeless. They had creepy doll-like eyes and were soulless. That’s the word so many players used over and over, or they used lifeless.

I didn’t like the appearance of TS4 from the beginning. I had hoped they would continue making the worlds and characters more realistic in appearance. They wanted to have the widest pool of potential players to exploit with all the paid content they’ve made for the 4th game.

I just couldn’t get into it. I didn’t like it and the game was missing so many basics when it came out.

Now, we have inZOI. There is already more content in this game than any Sims base game ever had. I like the more realistic look of the world and zois because I love nice looking games. I’m not at all ashamed to say it: I am a graphics snob!

There’s another game called Paralives that I think might’ve come out by now, or it is very soon. I’m not interested in playing that game. It’s an indie game, so I don’t blame them for their art style, but there are other indie games I’ve played with much more beautiful painterly-style visuals.

Over the past year, I haven’t spent any time playing other games, even though I fully intended to! 1200+ hrs in this wonderful game, and I’m still happy playing inZOI! Every update makes it better, and I just can’t wait to see how amazing it will be when it reaches its full release.

[juegaterapia]

hello!! great topic and beautiful photos, it’s definitely difficult.

If the look of the sims and the sharpness and lights aren’t the same anymore, however I haven’t been able to play inzoi with businesses for example (among many other things), I have no interest and that’s even though I love that feature, but I’ve already spent many hours building my stores in sims 4 that are there looking very nice and working very well, even though I don’t play with them, I can’t surpass them, nor can I build my dream house.

It’s possible that if a sims 4 expansion comes out that I like I’ll play again, while inzoi finishes its early access, I’ll get used to it anyway because of how long the expansions last

I firmly believe that inzoi will be the sims of the future for everyone, I don’t see other games that can compete on the horizon and these games aren’t made in two days. Sims 4 is already very old, it’s from another era, it’s done its service and now it will be left for kids, but inzoi still has a lot of work ahead if it wants to hook all of us (millions of players) like the sims have done for decades.

cheers

[mialuce66]

Incredible, I could have written exactly the same words as you, my experience is identical to yours.

[NIck_Olay]

Read what I’m writing on the forum. In short: InZoi is not a realistic simulator, which is how Livesim should be. But it’s also not cartoony like The Sims 4 or Paradise. InZoi probably can’t figure out who she is or what she’s talking about. My suggestions are to make it realistic (without a very strong emphasis on reality - without making it absurd), and we don’t need cartoon new games, they already exist.

[Liessahl]

In terms of graphics, InZoi simply blows everything else out of the water. I don’t particularly like the art style of Paralives, and Sims 4 just looks hideous to me, even for a 2014 game. It’s nice that they offer different filters as well, although I prefer the default visuals.

In terms of gameplay, I never even bought The Sims 4 as I didn’t like the way the series was trending - shoving you towards their premium currency, and charging absurd amounts for stuff that should be in the base game. And obviously Paralives hasn’t released yet. So I can really only compare InZoi to the earlier Sims games. So far it’s stacking up extremely well, though there’s still a lot of work to be done, particularly in making gameplay more of a challenge and less dollshousey. Allowing some difficulty options such as reduced starting funds, and rebalancing the economy so it’s less easy to make stupid amounts of money, would help a lot with this.

I don’t find InZoi ‘soulless’ but I think a lot of that perception comes from the lack of lore in the game. A lot of the fun and humour of the Sims games came from the base game families and their pre-existing stories, relationships and conflicts - you don’t really get this with the pre-made families in InZoi. Of course this is mainly because it’s still Early Access, and this is something I’d expect to be added quite late in development, but I think it’s something worth pointing out to the devs.