Can you stop complaining about Zero Company? It’s getting boring.
Every time a new Star Wars game gets announced, the same reflex kicks in: people immediately start whining that it isn’t Battlefront 3. A new trailer drops, someone sees ‘turn-based’ or ‘single-player,’ and within minutes the comment sections fill up with demands for another live-service shooter from a studio that doesn’t exist anymore.
Zero Company didn’t even get a full day before this started. A game made by Bit Reactor, staffed with people who built XCOM 2 and Enemy Unknown, immediately caught shit because it wasn’t a sequel to a 2017 multiplayer game that nearly collapsed under its own microtransactions. Fans stopped looking at what’s being made and started complaining about what it isn’t.
Star Wars gaming has eaten itself alive. People complain endlessly about the lack of variety, then revolt the moment they get something that isn’t another nostalgia machine. They don’t want games, they want validation. A familiar title, the same tone, the same mechanics. Anything new triggers outrage because it doesn’t replicate the exact experience they had fifteen years ago when they still had time to play eight-hour sessions every night.
Let’s be honest: another Battlefront from EA would be a disaster. DICE as it existed in 2015 is gone. EA spent years turning those studios into content farms for seasonal shooters, gutting any chance of a standalone Star Wars project. The people calling for a “proper Battlefront 3” aren’t asking for a better game, they’re asking for a ghost.
Zero Company is the first interesting Star Wars pitch in years. A proper turn-based tactics game, set in the Clone Wars, built by developers who understand pacing, squad design, and the tension of limited information. The genre fits the setting: tight operations, moral choices, and battles that feel like survival. The people behind it don’t need to chase spectacle; they can focus on the mechanics that make strategy games work. And for once, it isn’t being buried under a multiplayer requirement or a loot system.
The response to Zero Company from the Star Wars gaming community is a perfect snapshot of what’s wrong with fandom. People whining that ‘Star Wars should only be an action game,’ or that they ‘just want another Battlefront,’ like the universe should exist only to feed their narrow sense of nostalgia. Then others – usually the ones who’ve played a strategy game in the past decade – point out the obvious: the XCOM devs are making a Star Wars tactics game, it’ll probably run properly at launch, and it’s being made for an audience that’s been ignored since Empire at War.
There’s more to Star Wars than reflex shooting and lightsabers. The franchise can handle more than one tone at a time. But you wouldn’t know that from the noise online. The loudest voices come from people who think Star Wars games should exist in a permanent time loop where it’s always 2005, and Pandemic still exists, and EA hasn’t spent ten years strip-mining the brand for short-term revenue.
If you’re angry that Zero Company isn’t Battlefront 3, you’re not protecting Star Wars, you’re strangling it. You’re telling publishers that innovation isn’t worth the risk, that the only safe move is nostalgia. That’s how the brand gets stuck in reruns. So instead of demanding another broken shooter with a battle pass, maybe let the one game trying something different exist without catching strays from people who can’t let go of a logo.
Star Wars needs more weird projects like Zero Company. Smaller scope, smarter design, ideas that test the edges of the setting instead of repeating the same cinematic fantasy. If that makes you uncomfortable because it isn’t the game you wanted, that’s fine. Don’t buy it. But stop treating every new idea as a personal attack. Some of us would like to play something that works.