Creating new life is a beloved part of games like The Sims, but InZOI babies have proved a tough challenge for the newcomer to implement. Hype around the new life sim from Krafton’s InZOI Studio has continued to grow, but with that comes mounting pressure. As we near its early access launch, I spoke with game director Hyungjun ‘Kjun’ Kim about the weight of expectation, which parts of the game still feel notably incomplete, and why babies created a philosophical conundrum for the team.
“The project first started small,” Kjun tells me via email interview. “But as anticipation grew beyond what we had imagined, I started to feel anxious. Like anything in life, high expectations are much harder to meet.” He says he still considers himself a beginner in the genre of life games, and hoped to start small and gradually build InZOI over the course of early access. “However, as excitement from the market and those around us grew, so did the pressure.”
“The truth is, InZOI is not yet the masterpiece that some may expect it to be,” Kjun remarks. “That said, I believe that these expectations can serve as motivation to push the game in a better direction, and my focus remains on refining InZOI with the players.” He cites babies and cars as two of the main features that he considers unfinished, while also bringing up the exterior features of build mode and the career system as other key pain points.
Babies, while cute, proved “a source of various issues,” Kjun says. “The biggest issue was implementing protection for them. For example, when a fire breaks out the baby needs to be immune from the fire to keep it safe, and even the Zoi holding the baby needs to be kept safe, which creates complex issues regarding exceptions.”
I’m already envisioning scenarios where players use ‘baby carrying tech’ to circumnavigate hazards. “Babies didn’t just present a systemic challenge, but also a philosophical one that we had to give up some of the game’s features for.” Having little ones is such a core part of games like The Sims, so I can appreciate why InZOI Studio was so eager to ensure they got it right.
Cars and driving are planned to grow dramatically, too, but the feature also had to be stripped back from the team’s initial ambition. “The original plan was to have 200 to 300 cars moving smoothly through the traffic system at the same time,” Kjun explains, but this caused long waits at stop lights, with traffic jams becoming “so bad that it was difficult to progress through the game.”
The team attempted to look to real-world traffic solutions to find a solution in time for the InZOI release date, “but we realized that there were even real-life challenges, such as traffic police having to manually coordinate to solve jams. In the end, we had to make some adjustments to find the right balance.”
The planned family tree feature, which is designed to record the history of your Zois’ achievements and memories across multiple generations, has also been put on hold for now. “The amount of information that needs to be stored over the course of a single Zoi’s life is enormous,” Kjun says. “To record this across generations and over a long period of time would be too much of a data processing burden, so we decided it wasn’t feasible to implement it at this time.”
InZOI is set to launch into early access Friday March 28, 2025, priced at $39.99. You can wishlist it in the meantime.
Check the InZOI system requirements before launch to ensure your PC is ready to go on day one, and get a step ahead of the neighbors by learning how InZOI cheats can give you unlimited money to build to your heart’s content.
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