Star Wars video games have primarily focused on action for several years now, but Star Wars: Zero Company breaks from that trend by throwing players into the battlefields of a single-player tactics game. The genre remains fairly popular thanks to games like XCOM, Gears Tactics, and Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate – Daemonhunters, but there’s still a perceived barrier to entry in a genre that doesn’t hesitate to throw a lot of gameplay mechanics at its audience.
Developer Bit Reactor is looking to avoid this issue with Zero Company, as the studio is aiming to create a Star Wars adventure that is both approachable and appealing to hardcore fans of the genre. Speaking to GameSpot, Bit Reactor creative director Greg Foertsch explained how Zero Company will organically teach players its systems as they delve deeper into the murky underbelly of the Clone Wars.
“I think that when you look at these games–in general–a lot of times the mechanics can overwhelm and you tack the story on later. By using the story to guide us, it doesn’t shut down doors, it open doors. “And it’s not just about what we want people to play, but also what we want them to feel. And so through camera work, presentation, and story, I think we’re able to hit a lot of notes and really make this game appeal in a different way and kind of innovate in a way that the other games in the space haven’t. I think we’re really focused on trying to like marry those two aspects of it, the immersion and the presentation level with the mechanics.”
“So, we want to make sure that we wrap the game with a good story that makes sense to people and tutorializes things as needed, as opposed to kind of hitting people over the head. If you want to experience the game for the story, it’s there. “If you want to play and you want to have permadeath, guess what? You can do that too. “I think making a game where people can appreciate, understand, and get into it and not feel overwhelmed by it, but it still has the depth and challenge, you can do both. That’s what we’ve set out to do.”
Lucasfilm franchise content and strategy creative executive Kelsey Sharpe added that Zero Company being a Star Wars game also helps, as being set in that galaxy allows Bit Reactor to do things in the tactics genre that other games can’t. “You can use the Force, you can call out an astromech droid for an assist, and then also so much of Star Wars storytelling is based on the relationships that characters build with each other,” Sharpe explained.
“At the same time that you are getting to know the Authored Characters, you’re creating these customizable characters and making gameplay decisions about who you’re going to send on certain missions together. And those are going to meaningfully affect both the tactical layer of gameplay and the experience that you have back at the Den.”
Star Wars: Zero Company will launch in 2026 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S. For more on the game, you can check out the reveal trailerr and read up on how its developers are aiming to replicate the wartime feeling of Rogue One and Andor.
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