Upcoming The Sims competitor InZOI will feature ghostly Zoi that hang around after death to fix their karma

InZOI
(Image credit: Nvidia)

The game director of InZOI, the upcoming competitor to The Sims, has revealed what happens to your Zois after they die. Spoiler alert: some of them may stick around.

If you're someone who likes to let your Sims live out a natural life, dying due to old age or an unfortunate accident, congratulations, you're a monster and we can't be friends. I get far too attached to my creations and turn their aging off entirely, but for those of you who prefer to let nature take its course, there is some life after death in Inzoi.

As spotted by PCGamer, director Hyungjun "Kjun" Kim took to the game's Discord server to explain some of its upcoming early-access features: "We want to keep the playability of ghosts fairly limited so it doesn’t overshadow the main gameplay, but we also want to make sure the experience is engaging enough when it does happen."

InZOI has a karma system, and if your Zoi has enough, it'll make its way to a peaceful afterlife when it dies. If it doesn't, it'll hang around after death as a ghost that you can "encounter at set times under certain conditions." They won't be playable right now, but that is planned for later on. "Any further development for ghosts will have to come after the release," Kjun says.

Although the ghosts won't be playable yet, InZOI is implementing Nvidia Ace, the company's generative AI that features text-to-speech capabilities meant to make NPCs more life-like. It calls these NPCs "Smart Zoi," and in the video shared by publisher Krafton they sort of just seem like regular NPCs that react to the world around them. I saw the tech used at an Nvidia demo last year (not for InZOI), and wasn't very impressed, but maybe it'll be implemented in a creative way for InZOI.

To get a better idea of what this Sims competitor will look like, check out our InZOI preview. You should also check out other games like The Sims if you're a fan of the genre.

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Issy van der Velde
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I'm Issy, a freelancer who you'll now occasionally see over here covering news on GamesRadar. I've always had a passion for playing games, but I learned how to write about them while doing my Film and TV degrees at the University of Warwick and contributing to the student paper, The Boar. After university I worked at TheGamer before heading up the news section at Dot Esports. Now you'll find me freelancing for Rolling Stone, NME, Inverse, and many more places. I love all things horror, narrative-driven, and indie, and I mainly play on my PS5. I'm currently clearing my backlog and loving Dishonored 2.

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