At Star Wars Celebration this weekend Bit Reactor and Respawn teamed up to finally lift the lid on something gamers in the galaxy far, far away have waited a long time to see: a turn-based tactics game. That long-awaited wish has come in the form of Zero Companya game that wants to honor Star Wars‘ past in the strategy genre, while also standing toe-to-toe with the kinds of cinematic experiences modern gamers have come to expect from a similarly cinematic franchise.
“I think that now is the time that we can actually do it and not cost depth and elegance, right? Like, we can do both, technically we’re able to do both,” Bit Reactor co-founder Greg Foertsch told io9 shortly after the panel revealing Zero Company to the world. “I think the genre is ready for it. Star Wars is ready for it. I think fans hopefully know they’re ready for it. Maybe they don’t! But I think we’re going to be able to make a game that transcends the genre and does justice to the IP.”
Zero Company has been a vaguely known quantity for a few years—simply as a tactics game that’s been in development since 2021—but it was only at Celebration that fans learned that the game would be set during the height of the Clone Wars. It’s a setting that doesn’t exactly spring to mind for tactical skirmish combat, given what we’ve mostly experienced with the conflict has been on a grand and broad scale of planetary forces smashing into each other across the stars.
“I think one of the nice things about the Clone Wars is we have the television show as like, such an amazing reference point right across seven seasons of storytelling,” Lucasfilm story group member Kelsey Sharpe said of the decision to focus on the late prequel era. “For every Battle of Felucia, or an Umbaran arc, where it’s army, army, crashing against each other, there’s also Rako Hardeen. There’s also Padmé and Jar Jar going off and figuring out the Blue Shadow virus. It’s part of the timeline where George [Lucas] and Dave Filoni really showed that you can tell any kind of story. That’s part of the fun of Zero Company too, right? Each player is going to customize their own Hawks, and then tell their own Clone Wars story. That’s the promise of the game. ”
“I rewatched Clone Wars as this was getting going with my oldest daughter,” Foertsch added. “We sat there, and I feel like Clone Wars… there is all this stuff happening, but I feel like those interpersonal relationships and those smaller zoom moments, it’s just there all the way through. You’ve got all these bigger moments happening all around you, but then you’ve got the whole [D-Squad] sequence. There’s episodes where it’s all just action, and then it’s down to all the little stories that kind of percolate through it, it’s just amazing.”
But the Clone Wars as a setting doesn’t mean that necessarily that Zero Company will be wanting to tell a story in the style of what’s come before in that era. “We talk about the Clone Wars as an era, and that’s absolutely there, and we’re being authentic to it. But we also talk about the political background, and close zoom of Andor [as an influence],” Lucasfilm Games executive producer Orion Kellogg noted. “We talk about the original trilogy, and its pulpiness there. I think, at the end of the day, this will be a Zero Company story. That’s what we set out to do—it’s like, hey, what story does our developer want to tell, and how do we help them tell it?”
That story is one that leans heavily on perhaps a crucial line in Revenge of the Sith‘s opening crawl: there are heroes on both sides, and evil everywhere. Zero Company plays in the shadows, a fight by players (through Hawks) that draws characters from across the galaxy and also across traditionally divisive faction lines to combine a threat that has dire consequences for the whole galaxy, regardless of faction.
“The political alignments, the personal relationships, all that sort of stuff kind of bubbles in there,” Kellogg continued. “There’s definitely things to touch on with our characters and their relationships with each other, and their relationships with the player—there’s a big connection there for us. We want to tell you a story where, you’re learning what is happening in the story the same time the rest of the characters are. It’s one reason we’re letting you create your own Hawks and step in, you don’t need to do homework in order to play this game: you step in, you learn what the threat is, and you figure out how to use the tools at your disposal to meet the challenge and find out what sort of leader you’re going to be.”
For Sharpe, from a narrative standpoint, the Clone Wars’ broad scale also invited the kind of questions fans have considered for years. “That’s part of the fun, the differing perspectives, right? We certainly discussed that, yeah, from a Separatist perspective, they were a little right,” she said. “‘Oops, that Chancellor, you guys should’ve kept a closer eye on him!’. I think that’s where [Zero Company‘s] bond system comes in, because if you have this idea in your head of like… ‘Well, an Umbaran and a Clone trooper would never get along,’, you might never deploy them together and they might never get along. Or you can be like ‘let the healing begin,’ you can purposely deploy them on missions to see how that affects the outcome of your gameplay, and that’s part of the fun.”
This focus on player choice is interwoven throughout Zero Companystarting with the player character, Hawks. They have an established name and background—an ex-Republic Intelligence officer who now operates as a mercenary special operative—but beyond that, players will decide their gender identity, their species and appearance, and then how they go about navigating the threat facing them, from who they recruit into Zero Company to who hangs out with who on and off the battlefield.
“I think the trick with Hawks is really wanting make sure there’s enough information for people to understand and to give them a grounding space, but then also not to go so much into that that they can’t implement or can’t project into the character they want, and see that perspective,” Foertsch said. “It’s a balancing act with that character specifically, to walk a line where you don’t give so much that people feel pushed out of it, but you leave enough that there’s enough intrigue to dive into it.”
This balancing act between a grand, cinematic narrative experience and Zero Company‘s willingness to let the player forge their own unique path through that creates an interesting challenge for the game. On the one hand, it’s clear that Bit Reactor wants to tell a compelling, morally complex Star Wars story, one filled with intriguing characters they have created (we met a few in the trailer, like the aforementioned Umbaran sniper Luco Bronc and the Clone trooper Trick). But on the other, Zero Company also wants to give players a robust suite of options to completely customize their experience: it’s not just Hawks that can be unique to each player, they can field an entire team of player-made operatives, avoiding the main characters entirely. They could even, as teased at the panel, field an entire squad of Astromech droids—not exactly prime candidates for the all-star cast of a cinematic Star Wars story (sorry, R2, BB-8, Chopper, et al).
“It’s trying to balance the player agency with the amount of narrative we use,” Foertsch said, “and allowing people to… if that’s what they want to play like, if they want to go all custom heroes, you can do it. You can absolutely do it.”
“I think in order to make it a Star Wars story, there should be characters and perspectives already there to bounce off of,” Kellogg added. “All Star Wars stories are these kinds of clashes of ideas. So we give you those authored characters to give you some of those ideas to clash off of, and then where go from there is kind of up to you.”
“There is flexibility,” Sharpe added. “You can build the bonds between your custom characters, or between an authored character and a custom character.”
“We’re not ready to put any bounds on what’s possible right now, but we still have a long way to go,” Kellogg said when asked of what feasible limits Zero Company might put on a player beyond a permadeath-on, all-Droid run of the game. “We definitely wanted people to know [with the announcement] that they’re going to be able to tell their own story, play different playthroughs with different outcomes. That much we know, and what the outer boundaries are, we’ll figure out.”
Ultimately, it’s all choice in service towards what Bit Reactor and Lucasfilm Games see as the defining core of what Zero Company is doing: bringing a cinematic narrative experience, and distinctly a Star Wars one at that, to a genre that hasn’t seen that before.
“The mechanics are up there, but the genre hasn’t seen Star Wars,” Foertsch concluded. “I think pulling in that, the blend of Star Warswhat this world brings to tactical games is so unique. It’s so deep to pull from, that I think our story, along with how we present it, the cinematic feel of it all, are going to be the things that make it feel special.”
Star Wars: Zero Company hits PC, Xbox Series X and S, and Playstation 5 in 2026.
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