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Electronic Arts’ “Star Wars Zero Company” will be the latest in a long, long line of video games set in Lucasfilm’s galaxy far, far away. But this upcoming single-player turn-based tactics title developed by Bit Reactor aims to be different from all the Star Wars games that have come before — and not just because it’s the franchise’s first turn-based tactics game.
“It would be very easy for us to want to come at Orion [Kellogg, Lucasfilm Games executive producer] and say, ‘Orion, I want to make a game with Yoda and Anakin and whatever,’ right? But people can’t attach to those characters because they already have an opinion of those characters,” Greg Foertsch, head of “Star Wars Zero Company” developer Bit Reactor, tells Variety. “From the very onset of this and looking at some other things that I’ve done, I wanted to make this where you had characters that you could latch onto that you could imprint on, and that you could feel connected to.”
Set to launch Aug. 27 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, “Star Wars Zero Company” puts players into the role of former Galactic Republic officer Hawks, who they’re able to fully customize (including their choice of a masculine or feminine voice, performed by Jonathan Freeman and Erica Luttrell, respectively). Hawks leads Zero Company, an unconventional outfit of professionals for hire from across the galaxy, which includes a Clone Trooper, a Mandalorian, a Jedi Padawan and more. Throughout the game, players must hunt down and stop Kundri Fathom (Rekha Sharma), the ruthless leader of the Separatist-aligned cult known as the Infinite Coil.
“Hawks is a very authentic role, but there is no canon identity for Hawks,” Lucasfilm Games executive producer Orion Kellogg says. “It gets to be you, and you get to impress yourself upon that character. But also the events that happen, they really happened in Star Wars. They really have impact, and they really have a place. So it’s a little bit of the best of all worlds.”
Foertsch says a major inspiration for the game’s narrative approach was the AMC drama series “Turn.” That show, which debuted in 2014 and had a four-season run, followed both notable and nameless figures during the Revolutionary War.
“Much like that show ‘Turn,’ where it’s surrounded by the Revolutionary War, there’s this thing happening inside of it, and you’ve got Cornwallis, and you’ve got Benedict Arnold, and you’ve got Washington, and they all pepper you from outside this orbit,” Foertsch says. “So you’re familiar with this stuff. You’ve heard all those names. You know what’s happening in the Revolutionary War. But then there’s the story happening with these characters that I’ve grown accustomed to, care about, and their relationships. And so that’s probably the biggest similarity to our approach to this. But we wanted to make sure that those characters were characters that you felt like you had a connection to, and that spoke to you in a way that didn’t bring so much backstory that you couldn’t craft your own theories about your version of Hawks, for example.”
From the Lucasfilm Games side, Kellogg says the priority was “a story that felt ownable and something that felt authentic,” which meant using well-known characters like Anakin Skywalker (voiced by “Star Wars: Clone Wars” alum Matt Lanter, who is reprising his role from that series) but sparingly and on the periphery of the story.
“We come back to the word ‘authentic’ a lot, but you’re not going to tell an authentic story about the time the All Stars got together and beat up on the other All Stars,” Kellogg says. “There’s great games where you can do that, but this game I think benefited from zooming in and from making everybody that you’re going on this adventure with feel real, and as we do that, we just find natural opportunities.”
Kellogg adds: “We didn’t start with, how do we get this character involved or that character involved as we go. We go, who would make sense there, and our Lucasfilm Rolodex starts to open up, and character availability starts to get hooked, and that’s the best way to do it.”
The Clone Wars era was selected not just because it’s a fan-favorite chapter in the Star Wars saga, but because “it had the most answers to the questions that we needed answered,” Foertsch says. “It allows us to tell a story that is unique, but still surrounded by really familiar elements that, if you’re a fan, you’re going to appreciate, if you’re not a fan, you’re going to come along for the ride,” he continued. “But it gave us a lot of freedom, frankly, to introduce the things we wanted to introduce mechanically, that also marry up super well with what’s going on in the canon.”
As for the choice to make a turn-based tactics game in the vein of “XCOM” (a franchise near and dear to Firaxis Games vet Foertsch and his studio Bit Reactor as a whole), a genre that’s not the most accessible to the average, everyday gamer, the “Zero Company” dev says “there’s a lot of things you can do to remove some of the barriers from a user experience perspective that we focus pretty heavily on.”
“I think the narrative, frankly, can really help deliver the payload for how to play the game and what matters,” Foertsch says. “And if you don’t see it as this separate thing that you tack on later, if you approach the story like we did with this, where it’s woven into the mechanics of the game, it’s woven into the original concepts of what we’re doing. We say it’s about starting with Star Wars, we’re not kidding, we really do start there. I think that really can help Star Wars fans understand the mechanics and work themselves into this. It’s like you’re trying a different kind of music, but you still understand this music. You still get it. You can like it. You can go follow the beat. We can drive you through it. But if you’re a tactics fan, it’s got all the depth and mechanics and challenge that you might want. They’re not mutually exclusive. It’s making it accessible, not making it simple. I think that’s always been a driving concern for us from the very, very beginning.”
Kellogg says the tactics genre really appealed to Lucasfilm when planning for “Star Wars Zero Company” as its latest game because “Star Wars does not shy away from choice with consequence.”
“That gives texture to any good narrative or any good experience, so we welcome that,” Kellogg says. “But we want you to be wowed by what you’re seeing — the size and scale of the Clone Wars, the beautiful art that the team has put together, the incredible music is going to pull you into the experience. So all of this stuff, it’s going to lessen the barriers. And on the Star Wars side as well, we say no homework required. That’s sort of a mantra for us. We want to make sure we tell you the story from the beginning. All of that said, there’s going to be challenge where you’d expect there to be, and of course, if you feel like you need to loosen something up, we have options, we have settings, we have all of that stuff. But we do encourage you to embrace the full experience.”
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