InZOI Boss Confirms: 1.0 Launch Coming Early Next Year! PS5 Version in Focus Too

Looking ahead to InZoi's second year, which is meant to culminate in its official 1.0 release, there's still a lot of work to be done. "This year, the goal is to complete careers and school so that one person's life can be enjoyed in full inside the game," Kim says, affirming that the InZoi team is still committed to building out the foundations of basic gameplay.

Other additions, including prisons, vehicles, and a karma system, are on InZoi's release schedule too. The team plans to ramp up its user-generated content (UGC) features to help make a dent in a list of roughly 200,000 player requests, which Kim admits he wouldn't be able to work through even if he spent the rest of his life working on InZoi.

The main addition for this UGC push is Canvastown, an expansion to the existing social media-like Canvas system that allows players to upload custom save files or craft specific experiences using a vibe-coding generative AI system for other players to try. Overall, Canvastown has been designed to help players get to the fun faster, a goal which Kim says was inspired by surfing YouTube and being repeatedly told by his nephew that becoming a criminal in InZoi by stealing things was taking too long.

Canvastown will also be joined by enhanced support for mods and even optional multiplayer, though this will be tested in phases. Altogether, Kim says that he's "a bit intimidated" and "afraid of how players will receive [Canvastown]". But he ultimately believes that building a robust modding system is important for the health of InZoi too.

Speaking of InZoi's long-term health, I wondered whether Kim saw his life-sim ever getting the same absurdly large and pricey backlog of DLCs as The Sims 4, which currently has around $1,300 dollars' worth of add-ons on the Steam store. Aside from the resort-focused Island Getaway DLC, Kim says there are no plans for more expansions right now, with the focus being solely on the 1.0 launch and PS5 version of the game.

He doesn't rule out a change of direction from those above at Krafton, but Kim does jokingly wonder why InZoi Studio should have to pump out premium expansions. "InZoi is making a lot of money already, PUBG is making a lot of money," he says. "So, I always think 'why do I have to contribute to it?'"

With InZoi feeling more like a sandbox with each update, baking all these UGC features into the game this early feels like a good way to set it apart in the life-sim bubble before the 1.0 launch. Offloading development to fans in early access seems cheeky but given how ambitious InZoi is and how challenging it is to develop, I can hardly blame the team.

Source: GamesRadar