Quick Summary:
1. Mechanics (Provide toggles, keep vanilla for casual players, introduce values when enabled)
-Crime Escape Rate: Fitness (25%) + Charisma (25%) + Criminal Career (25%) + Luck (25%) → Determines whether you get caught, avoiding getting arrested repeatedly on the crime route.
-Fitness Check: Level (25%) + Duration (25%) + Luck (50%) → Determines whether it’s “Injury” or “Epiphany Level Up”.
-Cooking Quality: Level (20%) + Ingredients (20%) + Refrigerator (20%) + Stove (20%) + Luck (20%).
-The Sims’ Misconception: Focus on expanding features (new actions) and excessive convenience (like one-click functions), causing players to feel like they’re “looking for new animations” rather than “nurturing”, sacrificing immersion.
-inZOI’s Problem: Characters lack long-term uniqueness. In inZOI, once friendship is high enough, traits become irrelevant, making players feel like “there’s no need to get to know that Zoi”.
Detailed Explanation:
inZOI has great potential for digging deep into the characteristics of each aspect. Players who slowly experience the island DLC are truly moved, with a feeling like playing The Sims 2 and 3 back in elementary school, experiencing the tranquility brought by details. When you see flooding, fireworks, and snorkeling at that moment,
I thought of my past expectations for The Sims, greater freedom to create your own life, using self-created characters to experience various things and have new experiences with each one,
But what we got instead was endless DLC and various reskinned interactive items. A water slide is just sliding past it, with the main purpose being letting content creators film themselves sliding past it, then end the video?
inZOI’s Shortcomings:
Like I mentioned above, it’s very simple to raise friendship with each Zoi. I’ve seen that incompatible personalities make romance very hard to increase, which I found surprising and loved, but it’s not enough.
The biggest problem that destroys the sense of tranquility is: “Friends”. It’s the same problem as The Sims—for example, gathering at the gym, they just stand in place, chat with you, then go home? But inZOI has made some improvements, like when you invite a Zoi out it shows how far away they are and you need to meet up first before starting, which is great, but overall interactions are still terrible.
The Sims 3 lets you choose 5 traits, The Sims 2 lets you choose aspirations + zodiac signs, The Sims Medieval gives each career a completely different gameplay experience, allowing EA to keep players feeling fresh and wanting to replay even with a formulaic process. inZOI definitely has the ability to do this.
If every character could truly be unique, players would stop complaining about the game experience and instead focus on optimizing the game (mods) and exploring how to expand it themselves, rather than EA expanding gameplay on their own. Leaving deep exploration to players is completely backwards. And games with these kinds of qualities will eventually become great works, and such games already exist (Skyrim, Outlaws of the Old West).
Finally: Please don’t add balance-breaking features or functions that let players control the entire game, such as: (one-click weed removal, fitness skill level 10 never needs to fulfill needs, clicking a character’s portrait to call them over, players dragging plates to wash). When a game genre that needs randomness feels increasingly stable to players, they won’t open the game again the next day.
“Off-topic: I’ll never forget in The Sims 4 when I invited someone to go camping at a new map, happily just arrived, and then they just ran back home???”