When a new Star Wars game is announced, with a fandom this passionate about their Star Wars, the first question is not always ‘what’s it about’ and often, because it’s important, ‘who’s making it?’ That question matters with Zero Company, a tactical squad-based strategy game set during the Clone Wars. Because the answer isn’t one of the usual suspects.
Zero Company is being developed by Respawn Entertainment in collaboration with Bit Reactor. Respawn, best known for Titanfall, Apex Legends, and the Jedi series (Fallen Order and Survivor), is no stranger to Star Wars. But this isn’t their game in the traditional sense. Bit Reactor is leading development, and that’s where it gets interesting.
Bit Reactor is a relatively new player in game development, but don’t confuse that freshness with a lack of calibre. The team behind Bit Reactor isn’t new. Many of the team came directly from Firaxis Games, the studio behind the XCOM reboot and XCOM 2. These are the people who made turn-based tactical games mainstream again in the 2010s. Zero Company isn’t exactly a copy of XCOM, but that lineage is clear in the way the devs talk about decision-making, consequences, and squad dynamics.
Greg Foertsch, Bit Reactor’s CEO and long-time art director at Firaxis, spoke at the Star Wars Celebration panel in Japan. He emphasized storytelling through game mechanics that naturally generate emotional outcomes. Don’t think of that as simple marketing spin, it’s what Firaxis did with XCOM. They made you care about your guys. There was emotional connections to virtual soldiers. Apply that to a named clone trooper in the Star Wars universe, and you get a sense of what Bit Reactor is trying to pull off.
Star Wars games have rarely embraced turn-based or tactical squad formats. In fact, you can count the number of Star Wars strategy titles on one hand. This has always been a franchise with main character energy, Destiny, The Chosen One, The Force. For the series’ first foray into tactical-strategy since 2006’s Star Wars: Empire at War, Bit Reactor is aiming for something deeper: progression, personality, and consequences. That’s an ambitious pivot for a franchise that usually leans into action.
It shows Lucasfilm Games is willing to trust smaller, focused studios with meaningful Star Wars projects. Not everything has to be a multi-million-dollar open world epic. If Bit Reactor can deliver a tight, replayable, emotionally engaging squad-based experience, it might open the door for other niche or genre-specific Star Wars titles. That’s good news for fans who don’t just want to swing a lightsabre or fly an X-Wing.
Respawn’s involvement is still important. They’re overseeing the broader Star Wars projects under EA’s umbrella, and their success with the Jedi games means they have credibility and influence with the publisher. It also means Zero Company is more likely to launch with a decent budget, strong QA, and a proper marketing strategy. This isn’t an experimental side project being left to sink or swim.
It’s a collaboration between a veteran strategy team and a publisher with a track record of delivering successful Star Wars titles.
And that might be exactly what Zero Company needs.
What About EA?
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. EA’s involvement with this project. EA’s track record with Star Wars games in chequered at best. When they signed the exclusive deal with Disney back in 2013, the expectation was a steady stream of quality games. Instead, the first few years were rocky.
Battlefront (2015) was pretty but shallow. Battlefront II (2017) launched with aggressive microtransactions and loot boxes that triggered global backlash. It took years to fix and EA’s name hasn’t fully recovered in the eyes of many Star Wars fans.
That changed with Jedi: Fallen Order in 2019. That game didn’t launch with live-service hooks. It wasn’t built around monetization. It was a tight, story-driven, single-player game. And it worked. EA backed Respawn’s vision and got the hell out of the way. The same thing happened with Jedi: Survivor. It was a bit rougher at launch, but still a solid game.
Zero Company looks like it’s following that same playbook. Small, focused, and built by a dev team with a clear vision. EA isn’t leading development, Bit Reactor is. Respawn is managing the project. EA is funding and publishing it. That structure worked for the Jedi series, and it could work here too.
Still, it’s worth keeping expectations in check. EA has a habit of pulling the plug early or interfering late. The hope is that after a decade of missteps, they’ve learned to leave teams like Bit Reactor alone and let them do what they’re good at.
EA’s involvement isn’t a guarantee of failure, but it’s not a guarantee of quality either. All eyes are on how much freedom Bit Reactor actually gets.