Hello Kjun and team. Thanks a lot for the newest update
I like a lot of what is shown here, especially the work on babies, genetics and some of the older systems that were left rough or incomplete. That is exactly the kind of work I was hoping to see from the “Fundamentals First” direction.
At the same time, I still have this growing feeling that inZOI sometimes starts polishing systems before the foundation underneath them is stable enough.
A new movie for the cinema is a nice detail. More animations, interactions and little pieces of content are nice too. I am not saying those things should never be added, or that every developer on the team could simply be reassigned to autonomy or simulation programming.
But when so many core systems still feel unfinished, inconsistent or disconnected from each other, seeing increasingly fine-grained additions can feel a little backwards.
For me, the biggest priority of a life simulator should still be the simulation itself: autonomy, relationships, memories, personalities, family behavior, reactions to events, consequences, and all of those systems actually influencing one another in believable ways.
I would much rather have one cinema movie in a game where my Zois behave like people with persistent relationships, memories and personalities than ten cinema movies in a game where the surrounding life simulation still struggles to create convincing stories on its own.
That is probably the best way I can describe my concern: it sometimes feels as though the team is already applying the fine polish while the underlying structure is still being stabilized.
The baby-system changes shown here actually demonstrate why foundational work matters so much. Reworking the underlying system can improve many things at once instead of adding another isolated feature on top. I would really like to see that same philosophy applied even more strongly to autonomy, relationships and the broader life simulation.
The smaller details can always make an already strong simulation richer later. But they cannot replace the strong simulation underneath them.