I find InZOI suspicious

 

The Sims is a tyrant lording itself over the simulation space with frivolous glee. Building itself up and up with countless dozens of DLC that make it downright impossible for anyone to just jump aboard and have a bit of fun nowadays given the several thousand dollar entry fee- unless you start with the base version of the game which is devoid of even the most basic aspects of what made previous Sims games so playable. It is really bloody telling when, upon looking up the price of all DLC in the Sims 4, the first two options are sites freely telling me how to pirate the DLC. Which, considering the game is currently available free-to-play, is essentially a step-by-step guide on how to rob EA. But when the alternative is paying a small fortune to play a complete feeling game- I mean, can I really blame them?

There was apparently something of an ironic stint on the original Sims when it released- finding a way to gameify not the exciting fantasies of the power hungry, but the banal life functions of the basic. They were supposed to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, it is told. Any of that disappeared when the concept ended up being a surprise smash hit scoring dozens of sequels and capturing that all-important 'captive audience' that everyone is eager to get when they make new genre types. Now I see the appeal, don't get me wrong. Playing god with the lives of others is always a little thrilling, as is simply guiding a digital avatar to seek a life better than anything you could ever have. Why do you think I'm play Persona? But I think most of us have really seen the Sims lose it's way particularly in 4 which even now feels like an overall step back from three. And it's been actively developed for 10 years! They still ain't caught up!

Three offered a full city simulation where you could simply zoom out of the household and follow some random on the street for several minutes to see what they're up to- loading screens be damned. Sims 4 wanted to pursue this faux-complex conversation and emotion system, however, which made it so that having too many NPCs loaded was simply unfeasible for the engine to handle. Of course, two console generations later that seems like a moot consideration- but given that EA have settled on this being 'the forever Sims' it seems we've lost the scale for good. And in it's place is an increasingly stuffy feeling 'ecosystem'. Yeah, it's not a 'game' anymore. It's an 'ecosystem' from which the team, obviously, can peddle content at your face with abandon.

Which is probably why even though this genre has been enfranchised with The Sims for so long, customers have absolutely no loyalty to EA and welcome all these coming new competitors with open arms. 'Life by You' got round-the-clock coverage for a time, despite looking like an unfinished Unity Asset hog in most of it's marketing, before that game got itself scarified on the chopping block for whatever insular reason which is going to look silly a year from now. And now we have Krafton published InZOI riding up and promising a level of fidelity and customisation that one could only ever dream of under The Sims, all powered under Unreal Engine 5's Metahuman character system that creates near true-to-life models. And it is... suspicious.

See, Sims-style games don't have any competition for a very important reason- they can get absurdly expensive to develop for. Remember that these games don't just scale upwards but outwards too. Every time an new system is developed introducing some kind of gameplay vertical that needs to be designed to work flawlessly with all the other systems already in place, and without in the case of selective DLC picking. It's kind of like the Minecraft problem except at Minecraft they chose the 'solution' of making everything increasingly more complicated to engage with thus ensuring less people would choose to do so. Which is a choice, to be sure. Sims just kind of has to role with the punches and do universal updates every now and then just to keep the ecosystem in tandem.

Krafton is the kind of publisher you need to stand up to them because, well, they have a crap-ton of resources. They are the publishers behind PUBG, afterall, so they can sink a stupid amount of support into digging into the market- even if that in itself does raise my first suspicions. Because afterall- when the barrier to entry is this thick then what exactly does the company hope to recoup from breaching it? Korean games do have a reputation for being absurdly heavy on the monetisation angle to a degree that many Westerners find honestly distasteful and when I see the hyper slick graphics and eye-wateringly ambitious scale I can't help but get Black Desert vibes. And that's not really the kind of comparison you want to be drawing.

I suppose what gets my suspicions up the most is the fact that the game looks like one of those 'too good to be true' situations. The characters are too lifelike looking, the full city simulation is too close to exactly what Sims fans have been asking for over the past 10 years, the ability to apparently scan files off your computer and transmute them into 3D objects in the world is just- heck I don't think I've ever seen a program work that seamlessly. I don't believe it's genuine. I suspect at the very least that NPC interactions are going to be basic and unsatisfying to play about with, the city simulation will in some way compromise on the full-freedom promise offered and the 2D to 3D scanning system will just break down and be a mess. Those are my predictions. We'll tallying up my marks when I get them all right.

But to be honest- I really do hope I'm wrong because damn- I'd really love to play a Sims style game that hooks me as fully as the Sims 3 back in the day. Just as much as I'd love to see a black eye dealt to EA for everything they're putting us through- not least of all the abominable EA launcher which manages to be an utterly cumbersome edition to my computer every year. Though every rational fibre in my body tells me to watch out- the believer in me wants to believe that the perfect Sims competitor is out there and InZOI looks the cleanest of them. But even if that dream does end up falling apart- there is a whole army of other takers swinging for that Sims crown. Here's praying one strikes home!

Tango has been saved?

 

Earlier this year we heard what was actually a very familiar concept within Britain when it came to the way that Xbox were handling the growth of their company. In response to a slowing of economic growth and the realisation of an over-investment within an optimistic age- Xbox opted for 'austerity'. Not utter such a phrase to as Brit and simply watch as the 'Winter Solider' style conditioning kicks in and they relieve all the most traumatic moments of the past ten years. Suddenly they'll no longer be seeing you because their vision will be clouded with visions of a thumb headed necro-Pig-romancer. (I swear that makes sense if you're a native.) We know very well that 'austerity' is a continent lie to prelude the following- us with the haves are going to take from the have nots until our balance sheets are looking steady again. And then we're going to keep taking until we're literally stopped. Cheers.

It's that kind of philosophy which is seeing the Game Pass package get cheapened and it's prices rise within the very same announcement. It's that kind of philosophy which is going to see the further degradation of the Xbox brand when key Xbox exclusive titles are shipped off to Playstation later this year and next year in desperate search of customers. It's that kind of philosophy that made Liz Truss lose to a head of lettuce. And it was that very breed of austerity politics that had Xbox unceremoniously shut down an award winning studio simply because cuts needed to be made somewhere and the only other alternative was the executives going without that extra shot of whipped cream from atop their golden-flake lattes. Sorry Tango Gameworks, guess you should have made a successful Live Service instead! 

Since then their hit game, which was the talk of the town when it came out to a surprise release, 'Hi Fi Rush' has seen something of a eulogy among it's community of loving players who seriously flocked to a unique game concept conceived in such a novel way. I even got around to playing the game and I have to say- I have absolutely no rhythm. I struggled through the entire first act trying desperately to hook on to a rhythm that the game was telling me was there simply wasn't. I did half-decently on the first level and every other level after that was me struggling against the core mechanic of the game to just have a normal hack-n-slash brawl. Dunno what's wrong with me. The game looks cool though.

It also won a few awards, and became a breath of fresh air that people needed after Xbox struggled bitterly to prove itself a worthwhile console to invest in, which is still struggles with. Now to be fair, Tango has had trouble getting it's audience over the years with a horror franchise that didn't seem to hit home despite a couple of outings, but what that enough of an axe over the studio's head to axe them the second they did get their hit? I suppose that's the kind of equation that can only be worked out in the alien-like mind of the Xbox executives as they play games with the livelihoods of those supposedly under their stable of games. All I can say for certain was that the decision to punish the successful cast an unshakable shadow over an already beleaguered developer for how healthy they truly are in the face of stiff competition. Even despite unabashedly superior spending power.

As the story goes, the creator of the Tango Gameworks, one of the legends of the horror industry, left the studio not that long ago and that alone was enough to shake faith in the entity. As though the entire worth of the studio and everything they achieved was tired entirely to one man and without him the studio is utterly worthless. Doesn't matter that those developers worked literally alongside him, that he helped to shape that studio to make those games, presumably in the hopes that they could go on themselves without his guidance- Xbox were relying solely on vapid star power to develop entire games for them. Because 'hero worship' is always supremely strong ground upon which to build a game development studio, right?

But we can hold off on the funeral for one day, at the very least- because despite the very definitive statements declaring that Tango gameworks had been wiped off the face of the earth, it seems a Valkyrie has swooped down to save them in the form of PUBG South Korean publisher Krafton. Out of absolutely nowhere the company has been acquired and now will no longer be shutdown- saving the award winning studio and bringing them out of the shadow of what appears to be a crumbling empire in the same fell swoop- what a story! Not that I really know all that much about Krafton and their style of management, mind you- but you'd have to be pretty bad in order to come off worse than the callous studio murderers Microsoft proved themselves to be.

They may be best known for owning PUBG but Krafton have themselves quite the portfolio under their belt to cement them as serious publishers who seem capable of taking advantage of the potential that Microsoft have stupidly squandered. They own Tera under their brand for one, including a bevy of mobile games with actually recognisable names- which is a huge achievement in an industry stuffed with a more oversaturated mobile market than your average English field is stuffed with weeds. They also, and this is news to me, are apparently the publishers of Subnautica- proving that this isn't a studio perpetually married to the online live service grift like so many of their South Korean contemporaries. They might be buying this single player developer to actually produce single player games! (Imagine that: Warner Bros!)

Tango Gameworks does not strike me a studio that is used up by any stretch of the imagination. They are not devoid of ideas, rough for innovation or totally trapped in the abyss. And now Microsoft are going to see them flare back to life and wince at every success they may see in the future. And you know what? Good. Seems to me that if Microsoft valued the company so very little that without one single celebrity involved they found the remains to be worthless- then they deserve the disgrace of seeing everything they cruelly threw away. And I pray Tango use this as a stepping stone to greatness because by god- this team deserves a break after all they've been through.