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Pinning down a squad of battle droids behind half-destroyed durasteel cover isn’t about fast reflexes or swinging a lightsaber; it’s about cold, hard calculations. And friends you can rely on. You pick out a line of sight, order your sniper to higher ground, set your flanker to overwatch and run the percentages, knowing that one wrong move could cost you a veteran soldier forever.
Due to be released later this month, Star Wars: Zero Company is a game that trades fast-paced blockbuster action for the calculated tension of galactic chess. It’s the first time we’ve seen the galaxy far, far away represented as a turn-based tactics game (a fan-favourite genre that includes Fire Emblem, X-COM and Final Fantasy Tactics). But on top of that, the game is also angling to become a top-tier Star Wars story, albeit one that changes in the details from player to player.
Zero Company is set in the prequel era, during the war between the Republic’s clone army and the Separatist’s droids. Players take the role of Hawks – a former soldier now running a mercenary company – tapped by the galactic government to stop a shady cult called the Infinite Coil, which worships an infectious disease and has been invading planets to soften them up for Separatist control.
But while the wider story is one of galactic intrigue and mysterious power, the game is also about more intimate narratives. Hawks is joined by many colleagues who could have been taken out of any Star Wars film or TV show – aliens, astromechs, clones, even a Mandalorian — who all have their own personalities and agendas, as well as their own abilities in battle.
Star Wars in live action has had success branching out to narratives beyond the Skywalkers and Palpatines, including with Rogue One and Andor. Animated series have delved into more mystical aspects of The Force, which seems to be where the Coil is headed.
But in games, the franchise has recently been better recognised for its gameplay and spectacle than its story, as in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
Lucasfilm Games executive producer Orion Kellogg, who supervises external development of Star Wars games, said the brand didn’t set out to tell certain stories in certain ways. It looks to find creators with a distinct vision and match their story with the interactive medium that fits it best.
“Our measuring stick here is our storyteller,” Kellog said. “Do they have something to say? Is there a reason why they’re poking into new territory?”
“We always want to tell the next great Star Wars story, and that could be a TV show, it could be a movie, it could be a comic, or it could be a game. And if we want to tell that story in the game space, we want to tell it in a way that makes for an awesome game.”
Finding a sweet spot between hard-nosed strategy and broad-appeal storytelling requires a team that understands the genre inside out. Zero Company is developed by a new studio called Bit Reactor, composed of many staff formerly of Firaxis Games, which is known for its tactical expertise.
Game director Greg Foertsch worked on X-COM 2, Civilization IV, Marvel’s Midnight Suns and many other tactics games before founding Bit Reactor. He said Zero Company was designed to bring out the best of tactics and of Star Wars by having the two elements lean on each other. Unlike Midnight Suns, which some players criticised for lacking the risk of permanent death found in X-COM, the new game strikes a balance between character-building and peril.
That’s why you won’t spend your time playing as Yoda or Obi-Wan.
“Choice and consequence is very important to us, and I think in order for your decisions to have weight, the characters do need to be new,” Foertsch said.
“They need to be characters that you could lose. If you’re playing with only characters that are iconic, and have a storyline after the game, it takes the teeth out of everything.”
