My brother in Christ, you made the sandwich
The Sims isn’t even as silly as The Sims anymore. Busted out Sims 1 a few months ago, that shit is fucking bonkers. Absolutely nuts. It had a daring whimsey that games just don’t really have anymore.
I’ve been replaying old PS2 platformer classics like Jak & Daxter, Tak, Sly Cooper etc.
Tak has pretty funny humor, if a little childish at times. And it may have not aged well in general (all white people voicing possible island tribespeople that practice a magic/religion called Juju), but it’s still fun and was pretty inventive back then with the cartoon proportions and interactivity with the animals throughout.
Everyone still loves Jak, and a lot of it is due to the art style. Everything in those games is so alien and yet also kind of familiar, but the way they mix the mystical with the sci-fi always intrigued me. It’s kinda like Shadowrun imo.
Playing Sly, I realized there was an abundance of anthro characters in the early 2000s. But the games took inspiration from cartoons and comics and leaned into those aspects and aesthetics heavily. There’s always a sound effect and sound bubble that pops up when you knock out a bad guy, the colors are vibrant and over the top and the stories are too. They live in a weird magical retro-futuristic world with laser guns, jetpacks, super-geniuses able to create mutant monstrosities, immortal cyborg owls that run on pure hate whose body parts can then be repurposed into a multitude of uses (hypnotization, perpetual engines, etc), and so on.
Video games used to be about fun.
Video games used to be about fun.
Couldn’t have said it better myself!
All the weird, off the wall, “who cares, we hope it makes money, but we’re doing it anyway” feel is gone. Get a bit from the indie space, but a lot of gaming feels like “what can we put out that’ll get us literally all the money?”It’s why the story is so flimsy across all those old popular platforming series, they took a “gameplay first” approach.
Look at the story for the Jak games. It’s all convoluted as hell, and there are tons of plotholes and such, but it’s probably one of the best series-lomg stories of those classics. Sly 1 had a clear story, and then when it sold so well that there were actual fans wanting a sequel, they had to come up with a story to justify it. Same goes for Tak, Ty, Ratchet & Clank, and so on.
Going from old Ratchet & Clank games to the new ones will give you tonal backlash
Then why did you direct it that way?
because they also wanted a realistic direction, so it was about balancing the two and realism meant sacrificing some silliness despite it also being wanted.
I bet they figured the players would bring the silliness anyway regardless of how ‘realistic’ the dollhouse they built is.
Does the game even allow for it given its realistic game design?
I was speaking in more general terms about how gamers find ways to have fun and do silly stuff in other games despite how serious those game might seem. For instance think about how silly and popular sharing glitches is. It’s not the same silliness as they’re talking about but it’s a good example of how gamers will find a way if that’s what they want.
Mod support is a surefire path to silliness if you have a playerbase that cares. Assetto Corsa is an extremely straight-faced game, but people still modded in things like “your car is a big stompy t-rex” and “everyone races on office chairs”
Realistic graphics with cartoon absurdity would still work, IMO. Though you’re gonna have to really lean into the Uncanny Valley to drive home the weirdness.
One of things mentioned is that the people wear towels when showering because pixelating looked too revealing still. Ok… Why not use big black censor bars or even emojis as is done in Saint’s Row’s reboot? It would cover things up better and be whimsical at the same time.
I mean, the article is right there:
Despite this, Kjun says he believes in the value of InZOI’s visual direction. “The realistic graphics also have clear advantages,” he explains, “they enhance immersion in both building and character customization, and the detailed world design has even led to some interesting moments during development. There were times when we looked at screenshots and had to double-check whether they were from the game or real-life photos.
Ferreal. They stumbled through the Uncanny Valley, but decided to camp elsewhere — and wisely. The rampant alteration by the frothing, untethered Sims modding crowd will tweak every atom of their hard work into something barely recognizable. Except for the towel-guarded bits that pixelation made “too suggestive”(?)… Yeah, that’s not gonna come up at all, post release. 😉
towel drops
Thomas the Tank Engine genitals
The little engine that c-c-cou— uhhhd! 🌋🚂
So, is there a nude mod yet? Asking for a friend.
It’s under development. Should be easy to find them in a search engine 🙂
I don’t think my computer can even run the game, the high requirements are the biggest headscratcher for me. One of the appeals of The Sims, at least 1 and 2 (maybe 3?), was that they could run on comparatively lower powered computers of the time, which greatly helped with sales
emergency-patch an oversight that allowed children to be killed by driving into them when in a car.
So, you can kill people with your car, but not kids?
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.
Tried the game, its alright but don’t really know what to do within the game besides making characters.
There’s no content. It’s just a fake family generation simulator.
I would really like to try this game but it kept crashing on my Linux system. :(
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