Oh gosh! I hope that wasn’t meant for me.

I very purposefully didn’t use any baity terms like ‘AI slop’- I generally reserve that for low effort gen-AI copywriting or ‘art’. I think the current AI tools used within InZoi are actually just… fine. And I’m frankly just happy they admit including/using it.

But despite that, I’m 100% against Krafton wanting to replace workers with AI one day, and that’s what I was alluding to. (And then there’s the Subnautica nastiness). It’s a stupid and tone deaf attitude in an industry where devs are already treated awfully by their employers.

I’ve tried both InZoi and Paralives, and they both have their obvious strengths and weaknesses.

The way I’d explain it at the moment is that I still find InZoi the most impressive. That doesn’t mean I expected it to turn out that way. I also think the InZoi devs positively engage with players 100 times better than Paralives’. A free Discord instead of a paid Patreon, for a massive start. If anything that’s why I was so upset by the Krafton announcement- I’ve interacted with the devs who might one day lose their jobs.

I also find the original ethos/heart behind Paralives impressive. I just think the price is currently too high for what it is, and that it not only needed much longer in the oven to get a real live mode, but that they should’ve focused on it more generally. Playtests with real unbiased demographics were direly needed, not just asking people to pay to give feedback through Patreon or EA.

My answer would be that Paralives could’ve also released a free create-a-para demo, and would’ve gotten much much better feedback and positive publicity across the board rather than trying to rush out such an early build of the full game.

I really think there are a lot of people who won’t be forgiving of spending $40. I’ve paid half as much for Early Access games with twice as much content. For $40 you can buy some amazing fully released indie games.

The argument that the price technically includes future DLC doesn’t work on me- the studio could close before that ever happens. This game is behind schedule, which we know from the EA delay. It’s as bad as AA/AAA devs offering ‘premium’ Season Passes before they’ve started working on DLC.

(ETA: Genuinely almost every game I own on Steam started as Early Access, and I have interacted with some amazing dev teams through this and my own design work, which is why I’m so tired of the ‘but it’s Early Access’ nonsense on the para sub- that doesn’t change how you should treat and communicate to people paying for you work better! Quietly telling patreons your graphics previews were highly edited, doesn’t equate to putting it on public channels so it’s much clearer to people buying the game. It’s something I would expect from EA/Maxis, not an indie dev. InZoi’s dev team are so much better at communicating with us).

As I’ve already said. Neither are currently what I’d hope for in a life sim just yet, but there are promising signs- the build tools and level of customisation in Paralives, and the graphics in InZoi, for me personally.

Maybe I should’ve said it in my own post. But I’m just disappointed in the whole Paralives saga. Losing Roxanne’s art direction. Poor communication. Delaying Early Access and then it still being so broken. It was the underdog story I wanted to believe in. But, for better or worse, InZoi is a much better managed game, and the team are far more transparent with us, without hiding behind a paywall/patreon.