The life sim genre has always been noteworthy for its popularity across a diverse player base, and inZOI – which launched in early access back in March – promised that players would be able to make just about any character they could dream up. This included an assurance from the devs that equal marriage had been implemented at launch, and that as far as Zois were concerned, love is love.
However, players of the launch version quickly noticed that even though you could direct an adult Zoi to make a romantic overture towards anyone they liked who was of an appropriate age group, the odds of meeting a computer-controlled Zoi who was interested in same-gender romance were apparently zero – meaning that unless you made a point of setting up a relationship between two Zois you created yourself, love was not going to bloom autonomously outside of those rigid social norms.
This wasn’t the only relationship-based oddity at launch, which also saw teenage Zois completely uninterested in each other romantically, and unmarried couples unable to get pregnant no matter what they got up to (spoiler alert: neither of these are true to real life). So there’s probably no need to read too much into it, especially now that Version 0.2.0 of inZOI has brought with it the ability to customise your Zois’ gender identity (the in-game term which also encompasses romantic attraction) to make explicitly LGBTQ+ Zois – and just in time for Pride Month!
How to edit gender and attraction in inZOI
inZOI’s newly-implemented gender and attraction customisation options can be found in the Profile section of Create-a-Zoi.
Where you see the option to select your Zoi’s gender, there’s now a third choice next to the standard male and female symbols, which allows you to make more detailed edits to the current Zoi’s gender identity.
Choosing to edit your Zoi’s gender will bring up three options which can be changed independently of one another:
- Select Gender Identity: Male, Female, Nonbinary
- Only one can be selected at a time; your selection will not affect the Zoi’s physical appearance or their main gender marker in CAZ.
- Romantic Relationships: Interested in Romantic Relationships
- Uncheck this tickbox if you don’t want the current Zoi forming romantic relationships at all (doing this also greys out the third option entirely).
- Attracted To: Male, Female, Nonbinary
- Free-selection allows you to check as many or as few of these options as you like, including none at all, without affecting the other categories.
By default, a Zoi’s gender identity will match their physical gender expression and they will be interested in romantic relationships only with members of the opposite sex, so if you want your characters to be anything other than allocishet, it’s important to remember to make these edits during character creation.
Starting a new save with at least one Zoi whose gender identity options have been edited will cause new NPC Zois generated in that save to have a randomly generated gender identity and experience attraction to all genders.
However, the wording of the new update seems to suggest that if you don’t go out of your way to introduce a gender-diverse Zoi into the population, all NPC Zois that the game automatically generates will continue to follow the default settings as they did before the update.
The ability to create Zois with LGBTQ+ identities isn’t all that’s new in love and relationships in Version 0.2.0 of inZOI. Zoi couples with complementary equipment can now get pregnant without being married (so watch out for that), while teens are considerably less chaste and can now form romantic relationships with one another. Several more wins for realism there.
The new update also massively expanded the game’s cheat console, introducing cheats for – among many other things – modifying pregnancies and returning a character to CAZ to make further edits (just in case, say, you wanted to enable some different gender options on a Zoi you made earlier). Check out our full list of inZOI cheats to learn more!