inZOI Development Update: Preparing for the August Update (Updated)

It is a wonderful Friday. I would like to share this week’s development progress from the inZOI team.

First, there seems to have been some misunderstanding regarding last week’s post. To clarify once again, the list we shared last week consists of items we are preparing with the goal of including them in the update at the end of August.

Separately from that work, we are also continuing to develop the FF list in parallel. It is true that we have not been able to address as many FF items as we would have liked so far. However, around 40% of them have been handled, and there are many items we have not been able to disclose yet due to the update schedule and release order. In the second half of the year, we plan to focus more heavily on FF.

In recent builds, we have been finding more bugs and stability issues than expected. As the person responsible for development, I find this situation deeply unfortunate, and it weighs heavily on me. Even today, we identified three new major issues, and we are preparing a hotfix by working on them over the weekend. With thousands of features in the game, even a single broken part can create a chain reaction of problems, which makes things difficult for the team.

We always want to show you a better game, but we know there are still many areas where we fall short. For that reason, rather than pushing too hard to add new features in this update, we plan to focus more on reducing bugs and improving stability.

I feel like I may be repeating the same message every time, almost like “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” but this time, we will do our very best to prove it through results. I believe in the inZOI team.

Thank you sincerely to everyone who continues to support us and generously share your feedback.

Have a wonderful weekend.

kjun ※ For the video, please check it on Discord or the forum.

🔗 Discord: Link

🔗 Forum: Link

Kjun’s Reply to Your Comments

Hello everyone,

First of all, I would like to sincerely thank everyone who took the time to share such detailed feedback.

This round of feedback included many specific thoughts on where inZOI needs more depth, which elements are interrupting the flow of gameplay, and how inZOI can further strengthen its own identity. I would like to share in more detail what direction the development team is currently considering.

The biggest direction we confirmed from this week’s feedback is that personality, emotions, relationships, skills, autonomous behavior, group activities, and school life should not exist as separate systems. Instead, they need to connect with each other naturally. Since many of you have continued to raise this point, the inZOI team sees it as a very important task and is preparing development around it. Recently, it would not be an exaggeration to say that a significant part of our overall development direction has been focused on improving this sense of connection.

In particular, we carefully reviewed the feedback that a Zoi’s personality and traits need to be reflected more clearly in their actual behavior. Even in the same situation, each Zoi should react differently. When their priorities for autonomous behavior, conversation style, emotional expression, and daily routines vary, the character can feel much more alive. We also believe that emotional expression should not simply be more intense, but should appear naturally according to the situation and the Zoi’s personality.

While adding interactions based on time, place, and role, we also identified a bug where conversations were occurring abnormally often. We also found cases where a Zoi would suddenly bring up negative conversations when left alone. Because of this, we are reviewing the conversation selection logic, which had not been sufficiently refined until now. Some improvements will be applied through tomorrow’s patch. Our goal is to make conversations occur not as simple random events, but as natural results of accumulated context, mood, and situation. We want players to feel that they can understand why a certain topic came up at that moment.

We also reviewed many opinions about the text message UI. Many players felt that the current structure, where a small notification appears first and the player can open the phone when they want to check it, feels more natural and realistic. On the other hand, there were also concerns that a full message popup could block the screen and interrupt the flow of gameplay. Therefore, we currently plan to maintain the existing text message UI structure.

However, apart from the UI structure, we do believe the content of text messages needs to better reflect each Zoi’s personality, intimacy, relationship status, emotions, and situational context. Recently, while reviewing issues related to emotions and conversations with the team, we also found that some emotion colors overlap and can be confusing. Because of this, we plan to reorganize the emotion colors as well. Once this is ready, we will share the results as soon as possible. We will also improve the names of interaction targets and the conversation mood UI so that emotions, situations, and context can be communicated more clearly.

We also took the feedback on the skill system very seriously. Many players said that for skills to feel like real growth, elements such as knowledge, practical experience, aptitude, failure, feedback, specialization, and rewards need to be better connected. It is difficult to change the entire structure all at once, but we will continue reviewing ways to make skills feel like a more meaningful long-term growth experience. We will also work on aligning the tone of skills with emotions, and in the long term, we hope to make abilities naturally influence not only balance, but also careers, economic activity, and conversation ability.

We are also paying close attention to feedback about group activities and the experience of doing things together. In situations involving family, friends, dates, school, restaurants, or clubs, if Zois scatter and act separately instead of behaving like people who came together, the sense of relationship and situational context becomes weaker. We believe the game needs a structure where the purpose of a group naturally leads to actual behavior, such as sitting at the same table, eating together, watching TV together, dancing together, or moving together.

Because of the bug that caused too many conversations to occur, we applied somewhat stronger restrictions to casual chat behavior. However, it seems that cooperative actions did not sufficiently reflect target weighting in the same way conversations did. We are also fixing the recent issue where Zois keep trying to leave the lot. We are preparing improvements in this area so that we can show better results in August. We also plan to adjust the data so that Zois behave more appropriately in parks and outdoor areas.

We also reviewed feedback on autonomous eating behavior. Situations where another Zoi eats a snack while a family meal is being prepared, cooks new food when leftovers are available, or repeatedly cooks even when they are not hungry can reduce the natural feeling of a life simulation. While adding interactions based on time, place, and role, we also experimented with behavior where a parent character prepares food when present. However, when we try to add intention to every action, the simulation can sometimes become unstable in unexpected ways, so this is not an easy task. Even so, we do not intend to give up. We will organize the meal rules that many players have requested and also work on increasing the variety of food.

We also received a lot of feedback about school and teen content. Many players responded positively to the High School update, but there were also many suggestions regarding school hours, club activities, homework, movement flow, uniforms, lockers, Prom, and commuting methods. We believe school should not simply be a place for classes, but a space where friendships, clubs, teenage daily life, and growth events all occur together.

We clearly recognized the concerns regarding graphical quality as well. Optimization remains an ongoing task, but many players also want to experience sufficiently high visual quality on high-end systems. The Ultra option needs to truly feel like Ultra, and issues such as vegetation, lighting, reflections after rain, distance rendering, and the perceived impact of DLSS have continued to be mentioned. Many players also requested that low-end optimization and high-end visual quality preservation be separated as much as possible. We are also reviewing graphical improvements for the next update, although the actual results are likely to arrive around October. We want inZOI to offer options that allow high-end users to enjoy better graphics.

We also consider the feedback that the city needs to feel more alive very important. A city should not simply be a beautiful background. It should feel like a living space where NPCs move with purpose, and where activities and events appropriate to each location naturally take place. We will continue working to create more diverse spaces that support this feeling.

We also reviewed feedback related to CAZ, hair, clothing, Build Mode, and Canvas. More diverse hairstyles and clothing, customization that reflects different ages and cultures, search and filter functions, better management of downloaded buildings, and improvements to lot information and previews are all important for making creation and sharing more convenient. We will take these opinions into account as we continue shaping the development direction.

Once again, thank you to everyone who shared such detailed feedback. We cannot reflect every opinion exactly as it is or implement everything immediately, but the key issues that have been raised repeatedly will continue to be reviewed internally and considered in our priority discussions. Some errors and improvements related to autonomous behavior will be addressed in tomorrow’s hotfix.😭

We will continue improving inZOI so that characters, relationships, cities, and daily life can connect more naturally as a life simulation.

kjun