I posted about the burglar event and my general feelings in a separate post in the Wishlist section of this forum, but good advice was given that this type of feedback has the best chance of being read if it’s posted in an active Brainstorm with Kjun thread. I think that’s correct.
I’m currently feeling very bad about certain things regarding this game that I love. Removing the actual soul of the game—the Karma system—broke the dam for me. The dam that holds all the little gripes and inconveniences in a safe and patient reservoir of hope for the game. Removing the incredible personality system just to copy the Sims for loud Sims players complaining or shouting demands in the Discord was also a significant player in the breaking of the dam.
But what has sent my reservoir of hope for this game flooding away was you/the inZOI development team breaking your promise to work on fixing and improving existing features in the game before adding new ones. But you were lying right to our faces through our screens because you were working on a system to own and operate a business!
What happened to free movement while scuba diving? I believed what you said when you spoke about wanting to have that ready for the Cahaya DLC release, and you said you would work on that. But have you? It looks like you’re actually rushing ahead, stuffing in features that the loudest people shouted for, and actively killing the game in the process.
I’m sorry. I love this game and I’m upset with everything that’s been happening since the release of the Cahaya DLC.
EDIT:
While discussing the Burglar Event, some other experiences were shared, so I have some more things to point out and suggest.
For myself and @Samuriko the cops didn’t respond as if it was an emergency. In my game, the police had to walk from the street to the Senyap Property in Cahaya, and the police walked casually until they reached the property, and then they ran to check but the burglar was gone.
The police should behave as if there’s an emergency until they confirm there’s no burglar on the property anymore, or they capture the burglar.
If the burglar is captured, any money stolen should be returned to the home owner
Any member of the household who saw the burglar could be called to testify in court (that would be fun) and if the burglar loses the case, the family could get extra money for damages (physical and psychological)
To help the inZOI team properly follow up on your suggestion, we kindly ask that you post it as a new topic rather than as a comment under Kjun’s post.
I agree with you. This is one of my main concerns about adding multiplayer. What we have needs to be fixed, no bugs, crashes, clipping, etc. Things that we were promised should be delivered before moving on to the next thing. Filling a game with half-finished, buggy features guarantees its failure.
I’m really crossing my fingers for the progress we want in the December update.
So, I read the comment responses, and it’s only Discord, and only about suggestions for adding new features, half of which are GTA‑style gameplay. Even I was surprised at the deep dive into criminal mechanics: listing all kinds of robberies, noise‑level mechanics, smoke grenades, tranquilizers. It doesn’t exactly dispel concerns about the game’s direction, though logically it makes sense (since Sims+GTA has been the most requested combo in the gaming industry since 2006). Still… I was mildly shocked.
Guys, I honestly don’t know what else to say. I tried to start a bunch of posts about preserving the game’s USP, but things seem to be going in a different direction.
I haven’t been to Discord since they posted the Brainstorm with Kjun here.
If I go there, it’ll be to back you up. I’ll post my wishes in the Wishlist category here. I think that’s where it belongs, and it would be ideal if replies focused on the topics Kjun presented, and that players would be encouraged to post wishes here.
That’s what got me over here, actually. Maybe you remember that I was salty about influencers taking the freebies and then talking and/or commenting negatively about inZOI and the team. I had the opinion that the influencer program harms the game’s reputation and should’ve been discontinued after the Early Access release came. A mod on Discord encouraged me to post in the Wishlist category. I was concerned because some people here are told their Wishlist post is off topic if it’s not about the game itself, but the mod encouraged me again.
Then I met you online and you helped me see how beneficial the influencer program is as well.
Discord is so toxic. I don’t use Reddit much at all, so I didn’t know the general sentiment there is also that Discord is toxic.
I’ll pop over and check, react, and reply to your posts when I can.
Thank you For now, I’ll answer the post is updated and the full comment response included. I’ll read your post carefully and reply a bit later after work.
i’m not up to date with what happened but i always worried that the devs overlook the good ideas from small people and only listen to people who scream the loudest, while their ideas might not be good for the game at all, but because they screamed loudly, they get the attention while the wishes of the people who can’t scream that loudly without backlash, are getting ignored and suppressed by that loud group.
im still hoping they will shut down the discord and move everything here, cause this forum seems to be a lot less toxic and has actually lots of valuable feedback and seems to be much more organized on how to talk about our wishes
id like a gta kind of style, its a life sim after all and in a life sim every path should be open to take, the same goes for the opposite though, you shouldnt just be able to become a wide known criminal but also be able to become something like a hero, every layer of life should be covered, not just one or the other
No, that’s not the point. I remember you from the discussions about the integrated City Stability + Karma + crime system, but now there’s no clarification that it can be adjusted to fit the game’s style, like they promised before launch. I don’t see flexibility, subtle intrigue, or grown-up strategy here – the devs seem just go straight at it, like “oh, a feature, cool.” But a game is more about mastery and artistry: the ability to balance, to compensate mechanics, to sense priorities, and, when needed, to decline softly.
Here we go again, entire systems, like personality traits or City Control, are reduced to picking preset attributes (just like in action games) and that’s a bigger issue specifically for a simulator. It used to be promised that you could customize the city to your liking and each setup would give you a new experience. Now it’s just: Malicious Outlaw, lol haha. I took an arrow in the knee. Pure fun!
Thank you very much for your trust. As for the influencers, there really did seem to be some profit: the game literally sold over 100k copies. But then the decline showed that they still can’t retain players, because of a, b, c (this part is boring, here they missed small details, here a core mechanic is undercooked and it’s unclear when it’ll be fixed).
Anyway, please join the brainstorms here on a regular basis. I hope that in the next Kjun’s comment response I’ll see that the Forum Team has really worked on this. I’m writing here for now, but also duplicating, since there’s still no clarity on how the team operates (right now, forum feedback didn’t make it into the response, while almost all of Discord’s did).
I think GD means that yes, features are cool, but they need to be properly implemented in a balanced, coherent way. So that, as you said, the criminal element of gameplay is complemented by the alternative (heroic), or even the whole spectrum of human behaviour, which would be realistic.
I think there is concern that the devs are just taking ideas from Discord willy-nilly and sticking them in the game, whether they will make sense or not.
@SmallArchangel, yes, that’s correct. And going even deeper – there’s the game core, where changes later require starting the new saves (family/life stages, personalities, memories, planner/tasks/calendar, NPC/group/city simulation) or cause other issues. And then there’re add‑ons that expand aspects on top of the existing systems without breaking the core. Right now, however, the implementation is upside down, and on top of that, the initial systems get messed up too.
Mastery also means being able to set priorities and predict consequences, like saying to players: we understand, but if we postpone this and that in exchange for these fundamentals, the result will be bugs, problems, removed or fragmented systems, etc. Instead, what gets listed are minor hybrid systems, while the core of the life sim is only a small percentage complete.
Personally I don’t much mind repeated restarts for big updates, that is to be expected in EA anyway. But from a development and programming point of view, a decent foundation is required before adding too much superstructure, or else the whole thing collapses (NOT a developer, but I think it kind of makes sense lol).
It might not collapse, even such oddities as Escape from Tarkov survive on crutches. But if they implement another core system after release, it will still hook dependencies in the core, and then there will be a choice: either edit the core or just layer it on top with fragmented pieces of logic from different systems, and most likely they’ll choose the latter. For example, right now personality is hard‑coded to 18 traits plus 2 additional ones, and without messing with it will be impossible to change anything. And it will end up like in The Sims, a construction of mutually exclusive systems.
Mastery and artistry are precisely about creating this flexible framework that will anticipate the need for new systems.
Well, just as expected, multitasking shows a lot of rough edges / seems – it feels more like two sequential actions alternating several times, rather than truly blending into parallel.
For now, I’ll answer the post is updated and the full comment response included. I’ll read your post carefully and reply a bit later after work.
