Star Wars Zero Company devs said 'there were some fights' about its story-centric squadmates suffering permadeath, but accepting that 'Star Wars is about loss' made the game stronger

Hopefully nobody's processing that loss while the Tuskens are around.

We know how that goes.

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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."
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.

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Lincoln has been writing about games for 12 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept.

Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.

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