InZOI’s system requirements make me eager to witness this stunning Sims competitor operating on a handheld calculator.

The Sims players among us have been gazing cautiously at inZOI, a new neighbourhood and life management game from Krafton. I am cautious for essentially two reasons. One is that the game makes use of live generative AI: you can stuff its jaws with text, images and video to create items such as outfits and animate your pet humans, here known as Zois. Your Zoi’s “actions and thoughts” are also based on “small machine learning” tech, which as the name implies is a teenier species of generative AI that commonly runs live on the user’s own hardware. Going by the Steam page disclosure, the actual base game assets weren’t AI generated, but then again, Steam AI disclosures can be rather unrevealing.

We’ve published a fair bit about the risks and potential abuses of generative AI tools in video game development, so we’ll be looking at that in more depth when the game hits early access on 28th March. In the meantime, here’s the second reason I’m cautious: inZOI’s key selling point over its obvious (and massively updated) rival The Sims 4 is that it has photorealistic visuals, and frankly, they creep the hell out of me.

So does the fact that all the Zois in the marketing screenshots appear to be fashion models. I feel like I’m stuck in a window display with a bunch of possessed marionettes, screaming at shoppers to bust me out before they harvest my bone marrow. Accordingly, the first thing I thought when Krafton released the system specs – see image below – was “please let there be a potato mode that makes everybody look like an honest, god-fearing PS1 NPC”.

The system specs accompany a blog post that lays out how to achieve optimal settings, including choice of storage and resolution and which kind of ray tracing to implement. We’ll let hardware editor James be the judge of all that, thanks.

The devs are naturally well aware that their gleaming Unreal beastie innately requires more juice than other life sims, and are keen to ensure that as many people get to play as possible. “As mentioned earlier, inZOI delivers high-quality graphics and realistic city-level simulations, which require higher system specifications,” they write. “While these requirements ensure the best possible gameplay experience, we remain committed to making inZOI accessible to more players. We plan to implement a feature that automatically adjusts game settings to provide the best possible experience. Additionally, we will continue working on optimizations to improve performance while finding ways to lower system requirements without compromising overall quality.”

To accompany the post, they’ve knocked together one of those comparison videos in which builds running at different settings are steadily erased by a merciless horizontal screen wipe, as though whole dimensions were being repeatedly deleted by some kind of spacetime eruption. The vid also shows off some close-ups of NPCs who, in fairness, pretty much look like regular people rather than varnished catwalk vampires.

Still, there’s no “true” potato mode here from the looks of the video. That’s a shame, because I think running games on absurdly low specs often reveals fascinating things about their art direction. Given a dev team who are really committed to low-end play, you sometimes get what feels like a distinct game. For example, I find Hardspace: Shipbreaker rather lovely when you boil back the resolution and detail. Sometimes it’s more intriguing when the min spec implementation is crude. There’s another game I can’t quite recall which becomes a mesh of free-floating pipes and chimneys when you oblige it to run in Abacus Mode. Any recommendations, dear reader?