Post-Celebration Breakdown: 'Star Wars Zero Company'

Apr 26

Zeo Compnay — Image Source: StarWars.com

After a great deal of excitement over what Star Wars title Bit Reactor was cooking up, Star Wars Celebration Japan gave us a great look at Zero Company through the gaming company’s panel. But with Celebration now over, CultureSlate thinks it would be smart to take a breath and then look over all of the information so far revealed about this single-player turn-based tactics game. We’ll reiterate some of the key details, narrow in on some specifics, and theorize about a few mysteries Bit Reactor is keeping hidden up their sleeves.

The Core IdeasAnd Gameplay

One of the key elements discussed at the Bit Reactor Celebration panel was how they had crafted three guiding principles for the creation of Zero Company. These were:

Start with Star Wars: This involved working externally and internally with people who know the franchise. Not only are a number of the team members avid fans, but several also worked at Respawn on the Jedi games, while the figures from Lucasfilm who also helped have their jobs rooted in the world of Star Wars.
Meaningful Choices: When players are playing as Hawks, the leader of Zero Company, they’ll make choices that matter and have pivotal consequences for the survival of both their own created operators and those created as characters for the story. Such settings around character death can be turned off or modified based on game difficulty, but if this game shares any DNA with X-COM, you can bet debuffs like exhaustion or injuries on characters will still play a big role on the lower difficulties.
Cinematic and Approachable: Bit Reactor approached Zero Company believing that, in the words of Orion Kellogg (executive producer with Lucasfilm Games Team), “Depth shouldn’t cost you elegance.” One of the ways they plan to do this is with a cinematic camera that will zoom around the battlefield and capture moments that matter. It seems clear that Bit Reactor is eager to push strategy games forward, both through the customization of many characters, but also in other ways, which we’ll now discuss.

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Zero Company — Image Source: StarWars.com

We don’t have a lot of gameplay at the moment to see these core design principles in action, but we do have a few shots of the UI and brief clips of the game. One of these images can be seen above, and we can say the UI looks smooth and informative. Classic gameplay elements of any strategy game in the X-COM mold appear, such as overwatch, character movement, and a healing ability. The range of other symbols probably references skills either unique to Hawks, or skills Hawks has earned through acquiring experience and levelling up. We don’t see if the movement in the game is on a hard grid, or if it is more freeform or partly freeform, with a character locking against cover when they come to an edge or barrier. This element of the game will be one looked at with the greatest interest.

The Operatives And Locations

So we have two major areas of focus when it comes to the story of the game, the characters, and the locations we will get to visit (which determine the maps players will fight combatants on). First, for the characters, we have Hawks. This former Republic officer, disgraced in a battle earlier in the war, leads Zero Company on its missions. Hawks is heavily customizable by the player, with illustrations in concept art and statements by the staff suggesting diverse human appearances alongside aliens like Rodians, Togruta, Iridonian Zabraks, and Twi’leks will be available to players. These same diverse customizations will hopefully be present for the custom characters players can create to fill out their squadron, which can also be renamed as a player likes.

But the main stars have been the four named characters (plus Hawks) that represent a diverse group of complementary and opposing origins and personalities. These relationships can get worse or improve based on the choices of players, and this dynamic also extends to the player-created characters, though likely to a slightly less narratively-significant extent given the player-created operatives having less of a backstory to the core crew you probably start the game with. We’ll run down the characters below and theorize a bit about their origins or impacts on the game.

Trick is described as an injured, laconic clone trooper and wears Generation 1 Clone armor, which has sustained battle damage. This damage and Trick’s injury are from the same battle that saw Hawks disgraced. This battle could be the Battle of Sarrish, mentioned in the D-Squad arc of The Clone Wars as a major Republic defeat. Suspiciously, D-Squad was one of the TCW elements highlighted by the team as it related to discussions around being able to build your own customizable astromechs alongside organic team members of Zero Company. This is only a guess, as Bit Reactor could easily invent another battle to give them full creativity with the background to their characters. Regardless, it seems likely Hawks and Trick will be close, with Trick probably having stayed with Hawks and fallen out of the main military hierarchy, given he hasn't received an upgrade to their armor or is being allowed to resist such an upgrade.

Luco Bronc is an Umbaran sniper and is openly described as not forgiving the Republic for their invasion of his homeworld. We don’t know the context for the Umbarans switching sides and the invasion that followed, but we saw their senator get killed in The Clone Wars, and there are mentions of advanced Umbaran technology, also on display during that animated series. Luco wears the combat gear of his planet’s army, and a fun detail is that the gases that fill the helmet dome are combat stimulants. However, as a sharpshooter, presumably, Luco’s concoction is different from the everyday troops.

It likely helps him steady his shots through manipulation of his breathing, or dispel any fears or worries during conflict. Why he has joined Zero Company is something we’ll explore in the next section, but his character will offer players a chance to get the Umbaran side of a story so far only told from the perspective of the Republic.

Cly Kullervo, a Mandalorian gunslinger, is the next operative to focus on. She is described as a member of the ancient but nearly extinct Clan Verminoth, and that she joins Zero Company “as a direct route to completing a personal vendetta.” For reference, a summa-verminoth was the giant space-dwelling tentacled monster that threatened the Millennium Falcon while it was making the Kessel Run in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Given the relatively recent Mandalorian Civil War, we can assume the Clan’s status as probably a result of that conflict, though a long, slow decline is equally possible. Cly’s vendetta might be against other Mandalorians, regardless, possibly some faction that has joined with the story’s enemy, or might be a threat to the Republic, but this remains unclear. It's almost certain she’ll have negative feelings about our final main character, given her Mandalorian heritage, but we’ll have to wait and see

Lastly, there’s Tel-Rea Vokoss, a Tognath Jedi Padawan who is trying to “honor the legacy of her late Jedi Master” and “to complete her fallen Master's last mission.” She duel-wields two green lightsabers as her default, but further information is mysterious. She was apparently one of the first characters conceived for the game, with her concept art being drawn early into development, and then that design remaining the same throughout development. Her Master’s death may have something to do with the villain(s), the last topic in our article, but her Master might also have had goals or ideas that align with the mission Zero Company finds itself on. Her Master might have also had a connection to Hawks, and Tel-Rea could have run away from the Jedi to stay loyal to the now-former Republic officer.

Zero COmpany worlds — Image Source: YouTube

Lastly, we have the locations. Any X-COM fan will know that games like it often have diverse maps set across a range of locales, which often get reused, though usually moving objectives and enemy placement around so everything is not cookie-cutter identical. In a Star Wars game, though, you have whole planets to be represented by possibly one or two maps each, though we are sure that the sheer diversity of terrains and unique alien landscapes will capture attention far more than familiar buildings and bushes placements. The worlds we have confirmed for the game, thanks to screenshots or developer comments, are Vandor, Anaxes, Serolonis, Champala, and Mapuzo, with the promise of established worlds and newly created ones in the final version of the game.

The Story And Its Villain

By far, the biggest area of speculation for Zero Company has to be its villain. While this game is set during the Clone Wars, it would appear that the Separatists are not the main villains, or at least do not remain the main villains for the whole run of the game. The creatives and executives on stage at Celebration described the enemy for the game as “an emerging threat that if left unchecked, will spread across the galaxy and consume everything in its path” and “a corrupting force” that no conventional army is equipped to counter. There are a few possibilities for what this might be, so we’ll present a few of them here.

The first idea may be the strangest, but it could be true: the Empire. The setting for the game, specifically worded as “the twilight” of the Clone Wars, suggests we are at the end of the run for the Republic. Republic and Separatist forces were Sidious’ pawns as he steered the wars’ outcome in the direction he desired while preparing for the conflict’s end. The Death Star plans are created by the Geonosians, and the Republic begins to build the weapon at Palpatine’s whim. Republic facilities are constructed across the galaxy in proto-Imperial architecture, and proto-Imperial ideology spreads thanks to men like Tarkin. We also see, in the recently released The Mask of Fear, that Separatist propaganda artists were used to create material to discredit the Jedi Order, which was then taken and used by Palpatine to justify his actions against the Jedi during the time of the Empire. So, the corruption of the rising, hidden, future Galactic Empire, leading this company of mercenary operatives to fight the pawns of Palpatine without realizing they’re disrupting his plans, would be appropriate for a Clone Wars-era story. It would also lean into the darker side of Star Wars storytelling, something this story has been set up to tackle based on how it has been described.

The second idea, as it relates to a spreading threat and a corrupting force, could be some kind of third, secret faction in the conflict looking to accomplish their objectives. It could be a more insidious group than, say, the Council of Neutral Systems within the Republic, which desired neutrality for its 1,500 planetary systems throughout the Clone Wars, though probably fell apart during the later years of the war. This new faction might be looking to end the Clone Wars, but plans to do so through harmful means against both sides, explaining why Zero Company would be able to recruit a Separatist soldier like Luco. They might also simply be looking at forming some third, breakaway faction robbing both the Republic and Separatist forces of resources and allies. We got mention of pirates during the Celebration panel, so the threat might also lie there, with some pirate faction looking to break out and take advantage of the ongoing chaos to their own benefit.

The final option is something similar to the second one, but veers hard into the unexpected: some threat from the past, perhaps the ancient past, has been unleashed. Perhaps it is a Force user like Dagan Gera, or a malevolent machine like the Scourge, but regardless of what or who it is, they will be capable of literally corrupting individuals into its service in some form of mind or bodily control. X-COM, the franchise that a number of these developers previously worked on, is no stranger to mental powers turning members of a player’s squad against each other, which is a mechanic this game might include through a more mystical foe. This would also fit with existing Respawn titles, where the galactic past remains important to its present, whether it be through the Zeffo or through the High Republic events that took place on Koboh. We’ll have to wait and see if they reveal anything further about the villain in the coming months, though, given how long Respawn held back on reveals about Dagan Gera for Jedi: Survivor, we might be waiting until 2026.

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