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.
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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.