I’m a bit surprised about the coverage of InZOI so far. You’d think that the extensive use of generative AI would be driving a bit more outrage, going by how the Internet has treated the issue when it comes to Activision recently. Or the extreme amounts of jank, while we’re at it. People seem… reluctant to appear to be defending The Sims, I suppose.
I think people are really clamoring for some competition to The Sims. I feel that way myself.
But a lot of what I’ve seen of the game so far indeed feels so uncanny and off-putting. The generative AI feature I saw demonstrated in a video I watched, the texture generator, also seems like a huge step down from the Create A Style feature from The Sims 3, which I sorely miss.
I see how some of the weirdness in InZOI is in “so bad it’s hilarious” territory.
I am not an anti-GenAI zealot, myself. I actually think a few of the ways they use it there are perfectly valid and make sense to support user generation… but are almost certainly a moderation nightmare that is about to go extremely off the rails. Others are more powerful than Sims on paper but the UI seems bonkers and borderline unusable.
I can see the idea of wanting another Sims successor, or both a successor and a competitor, but it’s hard to see the treatment as anything but hypocritical at this point. If anything, I think it shows that there is a reason why there is such a gap between The Sims’ success and how many viable competitors have surfaced. Turns out The Sims is REALLY hard to get right. Even Sim City, which feels more complex at a glance, was much easier to clone or improve.
It’s definitely a hard concept to get right. Perhaps even for the actual developers, given how they’re not really developing a Sims 5 and how we see people sticking faithfully (and with well-articulated reasons beyond mere nostalgia) to older games in the series.
Paradox already cancelled Life By You. I’m not sure how close Paralives is to release. So it’s at least impressive that InZOI managed to release something. The only other one I can think of that managed to release is Tiny Life, but that one’s way less ambitious.
Yeah, there were a few attempts in the 00s (including several NSFW ones, for some reason). It’s definitely tough to get right. I see the on-paper appeal of InZOI, in that it seems to be going for the same “we’ll do what Maxis won’t” appeal the original Cities: Skylines had. It’s just that with The Sims you risk finding out there was a good reason for what they weren’t doing, I guess.
I don’t know what’s going on at Maxis. I don’t know that rolling a whole modern platform, games-as-service approach into Sims 4 retroactively is the right call, regardless of it’s due to a lack of capacity to do it or a strategic choice. I am pretty sure that a lot of the stuff in InZOI isn’t doing it for me, though. Those two ideas can be held at once.
I think the reason most people are okay with it is, firstly, because it runs locally, not on some massive datacenter somewhere.
Secondly, the type of AI used is either not generative; for the “smart Zoi”, feature, where it’s basically just an AI driven NPC logic system; you tell them what they should act like in a prompt and it informs what they do and why, taking it a bit further than their basic needs.
Or, where it is generative, it’s within its own ecosystem. It’s generative, but for its own consumption, rather than polluting the general web with garbage content like most generative AI is. If this causes their own ecosystem to be drowned out with garbage, it’s their own problem solve, not ours. They have a financial stake in keeping that ecosystem healthy to engage with, since I believe it’s a source of monetisation?
I’ve played the game for a few hours, but unfortunately I’ve aged-out of enjoying this type of game I guess. I used to be a big Sims fan, but neither that nor Inzoi grab me as it would have 20 years ago.
Those goalposts are moving at supersonic speeds, man.
“AI driven NPCs” are just chatbots, and generative AI is generative AI. I thought the issue with GenAI was supposed to be that the data for training was of dubious legitimacy (which these models certainly still are) and that they were cutting real artists, writers and developers out of the workforce (which these by definition are).
Nobody seemed to be particularly fine with Stable Diffusion when that came out and could be run locally. I guess we’ve found the level of convenience against which activism will just deal with it.
Which, again, is fine. I don’t have a massive hate boner against GenAI, even if I do think it needs specific regulation for both training and usage. But there is ZERO meaningful difference between InZOI using AI generation for textures, dialogue and props and Call of Duty using it to make gun skins. Those are the same picture.
I’m not saying I agree with it, just what I’ve observed in other discussions.
I’m not happy with generative AI in general. It’s worn out the novelty and is very clearly just another tool to extract as much value out of people while giving next to nothing in return.
Unfortunately, the cat is out of the bag, and the vast majority of people don’t understand how it works or why it is a problem. Meaning that, not enough people make a fuss, to the point where no action is taken towards legislating against it in a meaningful way.
The end result is games like this, which find a position where it’s not quite objectional enough for most people to make a fuss about it.
If I’m annoyed about anything it’s that. Gamers are so often using these ostensible customer protection or political affinity issues as a cudgel for what is ultimately a branding preference. This results on excusing some crappy stuff from people they semi-irrationally like (loot boxes on Steam games are fine!, we don’t talk about GenAI on InZOI!) but give extreme amounts of crap to companies they semi-irrationally dislike even for relatively positive things they do.
I’d mind less if the difference was based on size or artistic quality, but dude, InZOI is from Krafton. I don’t know that the PUBG guys are the plucky indies I want to stretch my moral stances to support.
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I’m a bit surprised about the coverage of InZOI so far. You’d think that the extensive use of generative AI would be driving a bit more outrage, going by how the Internet has treated the issue when it comes to Activision recently. Or the extreme amounts of jank, while we’re at it. People seem… reluctant to appear to be defending The Sims, I suppose.
I think people are really clamoring for some competition to The Sims. I feel that way myself.
But a lot of what I’ve seen of the game so far indeed feels so uncanny and off-putting. The generative AI feature I saw demonstrated in a video I watched, the texture generator, also seems like a huge step down from the Create A Style feature from The Sims 3, which I sorely miss.
I see how some of the weirdness in InZOI is in “so bad it’s hilarious” territory.
I am not an anti-GenAI zealot, myself. I actually think a few of the ways they use it there are perfectly valid and make sense to support user generation… but are almost certainly a moderation nightmare that is about to go extremely off the rails. Others are more powerful than Sims on paper but the UI seems bonkers and borderline unusable.
I can see the idea of wanting another Sims successor, or both a successor and a competitor, but it’s hard to see the treatment as anything but hypocritical at this point. If anything, I think it shows that there is a reason why there is such a gap between The Sims’ success and how many viable competitors have surfaced. Turns out The Sims is REALLY hard to get right. Even Sim City, which feels more complex at a glance, was much easier to clone or improve.
It’s definitely a hard concept to get right. Perhaps even for the actual developers, given how they’re not really developing a Sims 5 and how we see people sticking faithfully (and with well-articulated reasons beyond mere nostalgia) to older games in the series.
Paradox already cancelled Life By You. I’m not sure how close Paralives is to release. So it’s at least impressive that InZOI managed to release something. The only other one I can think of that managed to release is Tiny Life, but that one’s way less ambitious.
Yeah, there were a few attempts in the 00s (including several NSFW ones, for some reason). It’s definitely tough to get right. I see the on-paper appeal of InZOI, in that it seems to be going for the same “we’ll do what Maxis won’t” appeal the original Cities: Skylines had. It’s just that with The Sims you risk finding out there was a good reason for what they weren’t doing, I guess.
I don’t know what’s going on at Maxis. I don’t know that rolling a whole modern platform, games-as-service approach into Sims 4 retroactively is the right call, regardless of it’s due to a lack of capacity to do it or a strategic choice. I am pretty sure that a lot of the stuff in InZOI isn’t doing it for me, though. Those two ideas can be held at once.
I think the reason most people are okay with it is, firstly, because it runs locally, not on some massive datacenter somewhere.
Secondly, the type of AI used is either not generative; for the “smart Zoi”, feature, where it’s basically just an AI driven NPC logic system; you tell them what they should act like in a prompt and it informs what they do and why, taking it a bit further than their basic needs.
Or, where it is generative, it’s within its own ecosystem. It’s generative, but for its own consumption, rather than polluting the general web with garbage content like most generative AI is. If this causes their own ecosystem to be drowned out with garbage, it’s their own problem solve, not ours. They have a financial stake in keeping that ecosystem healthy to engage with, since I believe it’s a source of monetisation?
I’ve played the game for a few hours, but unfortunately I’ve aged-out of enjoying this type of game I guess. I used to be a big Sims fan, but neither that nor Inzoi grab me as it would have 20 years ago.
Those goalposts are moving at supersonic speeds, man.
“AI driven NPCs” are just chatbots, and generative AI is generative AI. I thought the issue with GenAI was supposed to be that the data for training was of dubious legitimacy (which these models certainly still are) and that they were cutting real artists, writers and developers out of the workforce (which these by definition are).
Nobody seemed to be particularly fine with Stable Diffusion when that came out and could be run locally. I guess we’ve found the level of convenience against which activism will just deal with it.
Which, again, is fine. I don’t have a massive hate boner against GenAI, even if I do think it needs specific regulation for both training and usage. But there is ZERO meaningful difference between InZOI using AI generation for textures, dialogue and props and Call of Duty using it to make gun skins. Those are the same picture.
I’m not saying I agree with it, just what I’ve observed in other discussions.
I’m not happy with generative AI in general. It’s worn out the novelty and is very clearly just another tool to extract as much value out of people while giving next to nothing in return.
Unfortunately, the cat is out of the bag, and the vast majority of people don’t understand how it works or why it is a problem. Meaning that, not enough people make a fuss, to the point where no action is taken towards legislating against it in a meaningful way.
The end result is games like this, which find a position where it’s not quite objectional enough for most people to make a fuss about it.
But they fussed about Call of Duty.
If I’m annoyed about anything it’s that. Gamers are so often using these ostensible customer protection or political affinity issues as a cudgel for what is ultimately a branding preference. This results on excusing some crappy stuff from people they semi-irrationally like (loot boxes on Steam games are fine!, we don’t talk about GenAI on InZOI!) but give extreme amounts of crap to companies they semi-irrationally dislike even for relatively positive things they do.
I’d mind less if the difference was based on size or artistic quality, but dude, InZOI is from Krafton. I don’t know that the PUBG guys are the plucky indies I want to stretch my moral stances to support.