Our hands-on preview of Star Wars Zero Company might’ve left us convinced that it’s more than just Star Wars XCOM, but just like with clone troopers and bounty hunters, there’s clearly some crucial DNA being shared. As with XCOM, Zero Company’s rogue padawans and plucky astromechs will risk permadeath whenever they take the field.
While permadeath provides some high stakes for Zero Company’s heavier narrative focus, some—like Zero Company narrative lead Aaron Contreras—initially thought the stakes would be too high. But in an interview with PC Gamer, Contreras said he and the writing team ultimately accepted that it made for stronger Star Wars storytelling.
According to Contreras, “there were some fights” amongst the Bit Reactor devs “around how much do we want to limit the impact that a character like [Umbaran sniper] Luco Bronc can have in the story when they can catch a blaster bolt in the face really early on and then they’re gone forever.”
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Ultimately, Contreras said he lost the permadeath argument—and he said “it was good that I did.”
Bit Reactor landed at a comfortable middle ground: Zero Company’s fully-authored squadmates like Luco or clone trooper consigliere Trick will enjoy some initial plot armor, as their introductions will be “woven in the critical path of the story.” Once they’re fully squadded up, however, “they’re very vulnerable, and it’s up to you to keep them alive and make sure they’re part of the team.”
After embracing the vulnerability of the bespoke companion characters, Contreras said the narrative formed around that limitation “quite naturally,” as Bit Reactor was able to create “a lot of conditional conversations and conditional content in the game based on who’s there and the choices you’ve made.”
Better still, it meant those authored operators exist on an equal level of importance with the generic, customizable operators that players can recruit in XCOM fashion.
“Frankly, it was absolutely the right decision, and it made it easier to support parity between our authored operators and our custom operators—the ones that the player creates out of whole cloth—because even those operators have their own personalities and backgrounds and specializations,” Contreras said.
Bit Reactor, he said, has “hopefully” provided the best of both worlds: “If you want to have a Star Wars story-driven experience with a cast of really well-realized, authored characters that we’ve poured a lot of love into, it’s there for you. But if you want to roll with your own team, you can absolutely do that as well, and we spared no expense to make that a satisfying experience.”
According to Bit Reactor co-founder Greg Foertsch, permadeath doesn’t just make Zero Company a better tactics game. Risking your favorite operators makes it a better Star Wars game.
“It was something that we feel pretty strongly about. Star Wars is about loss,” Foertsch said. “I mean, four years old, watching Obi Wan Kenobi die, right? It’s about loss—and also, as a developer, wanting people to not save scum, but to push through the loss to what’s on the other side of the experience, to feel it.”
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