From Newsgroup: alt.fan.starwars



EA's New 'Star Wars' Game Was Inspired by an
AMC Revolutionary War TV Series and a Love for Turn-Based Tactics
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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."



<https://variety.com/2026/gaming/news/star-wars-zero-company-clone-wars-developer-lucasfilm-1236832100/>





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