SEOUL, August 21 (AJP) - Krafton, the South Korean publisher behind PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, is betting that artificial intelligence will change the way people play life simulation games.
At Gamescom 2025, taking place in Cologne, Germany, the company unveiled plans to weave real-time AI into inZOI, its early-access simulation title, enabling players to converse naturally with digital characters and receive lifelike emotional responses.
“After listening to our users, we decided to redesign the roadmap from scratch,” Hyunjun Kim, the project manager at Krafton’s inZOI Studio, told reporters. “We’ve completely reworked the interaction system of the character ‘Zoi’ to enable human-like emotional behavior.”
The revamped system equips Zoi with a built-in AI chatbot engine. Players can speak directly to the character or send written messages, and Zoi will respond in real time with AI-generated speech. Expressions, gestures and mood will shift according to the conversation.
Kim said early tests produced amusing, if sometimes unpredictable, results.
“We ran a test where players asked game characters to lend them money, and most of them just ran away and refused,” he said, smiling. “We’re still in R&D, and there are many unknowns ahead — but we’re committed to pushing forward with bold experiments.”
Krafton has been among the most aggressive game publishers experimenting with artificial intelligence. Last month, it announced a collaboration with SK Telecom on a new post-training method for large language models, applied to three systems with roughly seven billion parameters each.
The models, dubbed OpenThinker2, OpenThinker3 and AceReason-Nemotron-1.1, showed improved performance on a widely used math reasoning benchmark.
Alongside its AI push, Krafton is still expanding inZOI’s content. At Gamescom, the company rolled out a free downloadable update called inZOI: Island Getaway, which introduces Cahaya, a sun-drenched island city modeled after Southeast Asian resorts. The expansion adds farming, mineral harvesting, deep-sea fishing and boating — mechanics that were absent from earlier builds of the game.
Despite the progress, a full release remains far off.
“When we started early access, we already expected this to take a long time,” Kim said. “We’ll keep delaying the official launch until we’ve fully incorporated user feedback. Not next year — realistically, the earliest would be sometime the year after.”
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