📸 BTS #9 – inZOI High School Update Playtest
For the past six days, I had the opportunity to participate in a closed playtest for tomorrow's major inZOI update.
First of all, I'd like to thank the inZOI team for giving me the chance to take part and help test the upcoming features. It was a genuinely fun experience and I enjoyed spending time exploring the new content while reporting bugs and sharing feedback in the forum along the way.
Since all of the content shown in this post has now either been publicly revealed or will officially release tomorrow, I thought it would be a good time to share a few screenshots and thoughts from my experience.
I noticed right when starting my early build version, that hair physics had been majorly overhauled. The hairstyles from the screenshots above are those I noticed it with first. The child zoi's braids swayed with her every movement and the pre-teen zoi's dreadlocks even moved behind his shoulder while playing guitar a couple of times, depending on the intensity of his body movement. I didn't expect any changes on these physics, so I was pleasantly surprised =)
Another even more obvious change hit me when launching the game. In the top right corner of the main menu screen, I was greeted by a completely changed Canvas profile summary. This feature had been asked for by the community for a very long time now, so I think a lot of you Canvas creators will truly enjoy this improvement.
On my first evening with the early build, my female zoi went on a blind date which had been scheduled many playsessions before. Immediately, I noticed that the devs had added special animations for sitting on a bench with your date. The first one was slightly bugged, because the facial expressions remained neutral while the animation was playing, but all of the others worked really well and looked lovely.
My favorite part of the date was the brand new hand holding animation. It is still quite glitchy, like lead developer Kjun told us in his frequent Brainstorm With Kjun posts, but I loved seeing them walk side by side wherever I wanted them to go. This increased immersion so much and instantly reminded me of Fable 3, where I ended up walking hand-in-hand with my several partners for most of my game time xD
Then I switched to a different save file to dive into high school gameplay which I had been looking forward to ever since the devs announced it. A tiny detail which I noticed right away was the automatically assigned locker. You can choose to decorate it with three premade designs. All of the options use the four stickers shown in my screenshot. Your choice can vary between both stickers on the left side, the ones on the right side or, like I did, all four of them at once.
You can store items from your zoi's inventory in the locker, but I haven't tested it yet. At least I won't have to click on all of them to figure out which locker belongs to my zoi now =D
The high school gameplay in general works very well in my opinion. I expected to witness some glitches or zois getting up in the middle of a lesson to wander around, but none of that happened. They remained seated and studied properly, while their teacher drew subject related things on the blackboard.
You could have your zoi get up to go to the restroom or to deliberately miss classes, but without your interference, they will study and act well-behaved. If I had to compare it to other life-simulation games, the process feels more like a well-structured Sims 3 high school / university experience than the glitchy, immersion-breaking one from Sims 4. Very enjoyable and easy to get into.
Every subject has its own dedicated classroom and offers a slightly different gameplay experience. In my screenshots I chose to show you the science class lab. As you can see, it can get really messy if students don't take the safety measures seriously, but nobody was harmed in the process of creating these scenes xD
Another welcome addition was the big break between the two lessons per day. Zois leave the classrooms automatically and head to a canteen / dining hall area within the school lot. They'll grab one of two available menus too. One of them tastes rather unpleasant, so your zoi will gain the disgusted moodlet for a while.
Once your zois return home after school, they get the usual tasks from the previous versions. In addition, they receive one new task (will be translated once the update releases) about doing homework. The homework book can be found in their inventory. A nice little task which a lot of players have been asking for.
And last but not least, the awesome new clothing for babies and toddlers. The devs added very cute accessories, e.g. the pacifier, teddy socks and bib for the chaotic eaters xD As always, the CAZ items are amazingly detailed and add a lot of individuality to the outfits.
(Disclaimer: I haven't had enough time to test every part of the build completely, but the parts I saw were entertaining and very enjoyable in my opinion. I've encountered some glitches, but most of them weren't related to the new features and had already existed in previous versions.)
Additional info: The inZOI update gets released on June 18. Make sure your drivers are up to date, because I know NVIDIA rolled out a new one about a day ago.
I hope you enjoyed this long post and it was able to shed some light on the upcoming high school update for inZOI. If you have any questions or feedback in general, please share it in the comments =)
