Star Wars Zero Company interview – ‘we finally brought this genre to new people’

GameCentral has a king-sized chat with the creators of Star Wars Zero Company and the modern XCOM games, as they describe the future of turn-based strategy and making an authentic Star Wars game.

In a year filled with great games, our extensive preview of Star Wars Zero Company is still one of the most entertaining things we’ve played in 2026. But then we are massive fans of XCOM and at least occasional massive fans of Star Wars. The former is the most important factor here because many of the team at new developer Bit Reactor worked on the XCOM series at Firaxis, before leaving to create this.

So we were delighted to get speak to Zero Company director Greg Foertsch and co-designer James Brawley about their experience with turn-based strategy games, the difficulties of working with an established IP, and the differences between depth and complexity.

We enjoyed talking with the pair so much we convinced EA to let us have a second slot on the same day, which we’re very grateful for. Now we just hope the full game fulfils the obvious potential of what we’ve already played and what the creators describe below.

GF: Hey, David, how you doing?

GC: No too bad. I was going to say I’m admiring your helmets but that sounds a bit rude. [Foertsch has several Star Wars helmets displayed on the wall behind him.]

GF: [laughs]

GC: I don’t know if I’m the best or worst person for this, because XCOM 2 is one of my favourite games ever and, well… it’s difficult to define how much of a Star Wars fan I am. Which I don’t think is an uncommon issue in the fandom nowadays.

GF: I think you’re in good company with those two facts.

JB: I think everybody that reviews our game should fit that profile.

GC: [laughs] So what exactly have you two worked on previously? You’re both ex-Firaxis, right?

GF: So, I was at Firaxis for about 22 years and worked on everything that was published by them, until we split the teams with Civ 5 and XCOM, and Enemy Unknown was where I was at on that. That’s where I landed, and I ended up being the franchise art director on the XCOM series, at Firaxis, as well as… I was on Midnight Suns for about two years before I left to do this.

JB: I was at Firaxis with Greg for about eight years. I worked on… I was hired to work on XCOM 2. Quickly absorbed all the mission and technical design responsibilities on that project, so I did all of the missions in XCOM 2, War Of The Chosen, and Midnight Suns. I worked on Midnight Suns for about five years before I left Firaxis to come over here and work with Greg on this.

GC: I’d love to get into that whole side of things at a later date, but let’s not open that can of worms right now.

GF: [laughs]

GC: Okay, so how did this start? Did Lucasfilm come looking for you, as seems to happen sometimes with them, or did you approach them?

GF: Well, when I left Firaxis I started looking at… I still wanted to do an awful lot with tactics games. I still feel like, with Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, we were just barely scratching the surface of, I think, how special the genre is, and the kind of stories it can tell, and how good it can be visually, and how immersive it can be. And I still… even now, with this game, I still think there’s a giant amount of room to go. But I had left and was looking for existing IP. I think I’ve always looked at everything I’ve done as existing IP, whether it was Civilization or XCOM or Pirates! or Midnight Suns.

And so, I wanted to make sure that I made a game that was visible for people and it felt like new IP on top of new studio feels, a little reckless to me, personally.

GC: Yes, I see that.

GF: And so, take one of the things that’s solved, to some degree. And so I was looking at IP that I thought would do well in the space, and I was talking to some different publishers and at that point EA still had an exclusive on Star Wars. And, again… I’m looking for an IP, I’m not looking for the biggest IP in the world, to start a studio in.

And so, I was sitting there one night, and I got a call from Vince Zampella, the head of Respawn at the time, and… I did not know Vince, and he called and just said, ‘Hey, I heard you’re making a game, do you want to tell me about it?’ And we talked for about an hour, maybe a little longer, and in the process we were just talking about the genre, why I thought it was a good fit for some IP, going through some different things, and eventually we got around to him saying, ‘Can you make this into a Star Wars game?’

And I said, sure, you know? [laughs] Four-year-old Greg is sitting there cheering. 40-plus-year-old Greg was, at that time, ready to have a heart attack. Just because of the responsibility of the IP. And, you know… that’s a big bite. He said, can you make this a Star Wars game? And I said, ‘Yeah, I can do that.’ And he said, ‘Pitch me’ and we ended the call. Which was a very Vince thing to do. And so I pitched him and a while later we ended up with everything a go. But it started with Vince and his vision for wanting to do several Star Wars games at the time.

GC: So how easy was it to turn the game into a Star Wars title? Because there’s some things that seem to fit perfectly, but then there’s other things… hiding in cover is not a very Star Wars thing and neither is needing multiple shots to down a bad guy. Because a lot of the guns at the beginning feel like peashooters.

GF: I think it’s one of those places where Lucasfilm is really good about kind of working with us, understanding what the medium is, and you can’t get away from the fact that it is a game. And trying to help us arrive at answers that work with the IP, generally. You know, there’s pretty much an answer for everything, conceptually, that we tried to do in Star Wars.

It’s more like narrowing the choices in a lot of cases, but there’s places where, you know… guns overheating isn’t really a Star Wars thing either, but in Battlefront, they did it, right? So, you have to do some mechanics that make the game work that will fit into the IP.

JB: Those are contrivances that exist in almost all of the Star Wars video games, so they’re something we just kind of have to lean into.

GC: I could see that with the Jedi in particular because… I’m not going to remember her name…

JB: Tel-Rea.

GC: I knew you’d know it.

JB: [laughs]

GC: When you first use her in combat, she’s attacking people with a lightsaber and they’re not instantly keeling over. But then the last level I played in the preview, with Anakin, he’s just steamrolling through four people at once, which is a neat way to show what a Jedi can do when they’re peak. Are there other Jedi in the game? I imagine if there are, they’re a secret?

GF: I would say Jedi are… rare in our game. But you’re gonna have to play the game to see.

GC: So you’re not gonna tell me whether Ahsoka is in it?

GF: [laughs]

GC: I’ve already seen you describe Clone Wars as the best period to set a game like this in, but I have to admit the original trilogy seems more obvious, in terms of running a clandestine mercenary group. You’ve got references to things from season two of Andor in the game, so you must have been aware of that, was that never a consideration?

GF: I mean, there’s a lot of connectivity in our game and a lot of deep cuts. The narrative team did a great job of kind of trying to build in little hooks to other Star Wars elements. I think with us, and the reason that we went the way we did with Tal, is that it’s not a Jedi-centric game, right? It’s a bit more like the original trilogy, where there’s a Force person on your team, but it’s not just about Luke.

For me, Episode IV was about the group of characters, only one of which having – well, besides Obi – having Force powers and it’s about the ensemble of characters and how they support each other. Rather than going down the road of making it a Jedi-centric game, that was where we wanted to land.

GC: I think that’s when Star Wars works best.

GF: I agree.

GC: But I also wondered whether you just picked that scenario so that you didn’t have to have do all the jokes about stormtroopers not shooting straight.

GF: [laughs]

GC: [Tediously long rant about how Stormtroopers aren’t bad shots in the original trilogy and that’s just a joke that, for some reason, the TV shows took as canon.]

JB: [laughs] You may have noticed the B-1 battle droids [the ordinary ones that say ‘Roger, roger!’] can certainly hit you if you’re not careful.

GC: It was interesting to see them actually become a serious foe, because once you get enough of them, they are a problem. But you mentioned storytelling there. I though it was really good, superior to both XCOM and Midnight Suns – which was going in the right direction but became a bit bloated, so that talking to everyone became a chore. But this was more like Mass Effect.

GF: Yes, we didn’t want to make it a labour for people and it feels… I think in our game, I think we’ve… they did a great job of getting it to feel really organic. I think that we were very conscious of not making it something that felt like a wall or a barrier, but something that people could opt to choose and to engage, in to some degree.

JB: Yeah. I mean, a great example of that, as much as I love Mass Effect, it’s like, I gotta go through the elevator to go talk to Jack. [laughs] I don’t want to do that!

GC: What did you learn in terms of storytelling, between XCOM and Midnight Suns? You’ve been promoting that, and the general improvements in presentation, a lot for Zero Company.

GF: I mean, I think some of the games we’ve worked on… these games are a bunch of systems and it’s very easy to get wrapped in the systems and then try to tack a story onto it. Our approach with this game, and I think it’s where we’ve evolved into… or where at least I really wanted to go with this, is that it’s not these two separate things. Strategy and tactical, but also gameplay and story – I want to weave these things together.

What happens on the battlefield comes back to you in the base. Those same characters that are on the battlefield are also in the base. And they’re interactable. So weaving those things together in a way that also creates some boundaries and some answer and… the story doesn’t limit the game, it gives it context and helps with making decisions. Otherwise, you’re looking at an array of all these options, as a designer and from a gameplay perspective, with no sort of direction.

James, working with Aaron [Contreras, the lead writer] and the narrative team, and our design team working together with them on how the operations work, and how that ties in and how all this kind of flows back into the tactics game, and the tactics game comes back. You’re looking a holistic approach rather than something that’s more… systemic is probably not the right word, but something that’s a little more segmented.

JB: It’s worth noting from the design side, that I think this requires proactive effort, because one of the challenges in building games is that gameplay and narrative are both competing to control context, and when they can work together and inform one another, that’s the golden place to be, I think. I mean, you can certainly choose to fall on one side of that, where my game is more about the narrative and the gameplay is subservient to that, or vice versa, it’s more about the gameplay and the systems, and the narrative is subservient to that. As you may have noticed, that’s kind of where XCOM falls on that spectrum. The game is built out of the systems…

GC: The game is the story.

JB: Right. The game is the story and the narrative is trying to motivate you between gameplay moments, but we wanted something that was more holistic, a better marriage, an interconnection of those two, where gameplay is helping to deliver the narrative. It becomes the mechanism through which the story can be told, but the narrative is also informing the gameplay, so that if we decide, ‘Hey, we need Separatist battle droids in the game, gameplay’s ready to design to what those need to do and how those need to play into the game in order to serve the fantasy that that’s supposed to deliver. So it really is like making sure that we’re integrating, that we’re talking, that gameplay is ready to react to what narrative wants to do, and narrative is ready to map narrative onto what gameplay is trying to do.

PR person: So sorry to jump in here. Final, last quick question.

GC: Oh dear. Any chance we could have a little bit longer?

PR person: I’m sorry, we have someone waiting.

GC: Oh, they already told me they were running late.

All: [laughs]

GC: OK, well this is the nub of it really: strategy games aren’t in a particularly healthy spot right now, in terms of non-indie games, but they have similar problems to something like fighting games, whereas fun as they are, there doesn’t seem anywhere else obvious for them to go. Do you agree with that, is that a problem you’re conscious of when you’re designing these games?

GF: I’ll give you a bit of a bird’s-eye view, and I think James can probably give you some real specifics. For me, looking at that… this isn’t a skin of any other game we’ve made. And Midnight Suns, for example, wasn’t a skin of XCOM.

GC: Oh no.

GF: It went in a very different direction. But I think each one of these games we’ve made in this genre, they each kind of speak to you, right? The game itself starts to have a voice when you’re developing it. That sounds very art school, but…

JB: It’s very true though.

GF: As you’re doing that the IP, and this is where that IP piece comes in, it starts to force you into things, no pun intended. Like, for example, we’re not on a grid. Because with Force pushing and displacement, we knew very early on that that was not going to work. Fog of war fell off, because that kind of interfered with multiple things, but one of which was the immersion in Star Wars and some of the goals we had in that space. And so, we’re kind of picking and choosing from our toolbox of experience, of what we think makes a good tactics game. Some things don’t make it in, some things do.

And I think from there is where it can really start to innovate. And, again, I think the innovation isn’t just from the gameplay mechanics, but it’s influenced by the narrative and IP, in this case, and I think starts to provide some new opportunities and maybe things that you didn’t think of before.

JB: Yeah, like Greg said, at some point the game begins to adopt a personality and inform the design more than some sort of architectural design imperative. But for sure, in these types of games, small decisions can result in completely different outputs, right? I mean, you can take a look at games like XCOM, where you move all your squad members on a unified turn, as opposed to moving them on a timeline [as in many Japanese games like Final Fantasy Tactics – GC]. That simple change completely alters everything downstream of it.

So, timeline-based tactics games play very, very differently than XCOM and Zero Company do, because these are games where you run your entire team, and you choose the order that they move in, and then you take turns with the enemy – rather than everything being interspersed with each other. And so, innovation exists in a lot of those small decisions. And certainly, there are a thousand things in this genre I would love to be able to try. And it all starts from an anchor point of trying to describe how it’s going to play.

You kind of have to prototype in order to figure out what that anchor point is going to be. There’s lots of things I’d love to try. There’s a hundred different IPs I could try to make a tactics game out of, and all of them would mutate in some fundamental way in order to inform themselves to the material.

GC: OK, that’s great, hopefully I can come back later and chat some more.

GF: Awesome. You’re just at the beginning of the roller-coaster, it hasn’t started going downhill yet. [laughs]

GC: That’s a point, how far into the game is what I played?

JB: A little less than halfway through.

GF: It’s about a 30 to 40 hour experience, so you’re probably about 10 or 12 hours in, maybe?

A few hours later…

GC: Right, well, thanks very much for agreeing to this, everyone.

JB: We’re happy to do it. I’m certainly happy to do it.

GC: We got to the gist of it last time but another aspect of that innovation problem is how do you make the game appealing to more casual gamers, without dumbing the game down so much it puts off existing fans? It’s a difficult task when your primary goal is making money.

JB: I mean, I think XCOM found a happy ground. XCOM, ultimately, was based on the 90s XCOM, which was not a simple game to interface with.

GC: Which I knew as UFO Enemy Unknown.

JB: That’s right. And, so taking that and finding a way to streamline the interface and how the player interacts with the game, I think, is the key to what made XCOM and XCOM 2 able to succeed. And then mixing in some of the cinematic presentation, like amping up the anticipation, the tension, are the things that a dry board game approach is often missing.

GF: I think it’s really easy to get depth and complexity being the same things, they’re not. They’re different words. They’re very different. Like, you can make a really complex game that people just will never understand, but you can make a game with a lot of depth that is still accessible, and I think the genre sometimes confuses the two. It’s easy to get lost in the systems and I think that’s a balance we’ve always tried to achieve.

GC: Marketing is so important for these games, because the action isn’t easy to make look exciting in a trailer, but obviously Star Wars helps greatly with that.

GF: It’s funny, I was just talking to our lead producer, and they were talking about this a minute ago, and they said that to be very fair, our previous games, we wanted to bring the genre to the masses. We wanted to show you that you could be clever, you didn’t have to be smart, but you could be clever. And again, that whole depth versus complexity. They sound similar, but they’re not.

But with this game, and with the IP, I think we truly actually finally brought this genre to new people. That’s what we’re really hoping for. Like, you can play one of the easier difficulties and just experience the Star Wars story, get a taste for what the game… the gameplay is like. And then you can ramp it up as you get more and more comfortable with it, to where it still appeals to people that are fans of the genre already.

GC: I was impressed by the difficulty, because I kind of knew what I’m doing and there were still some difficult moments, especially with the Coil getting more powerful when you kill one of them. I was somewhat surprised, although not unhappy, that you didn’t have an undo button for moves. Was that ever a consideration? Especially considering some will just save-scum.

JB: We certainly talked about it. But one of the things that makes it challenging to do in this particular format of tactics is that there’s a lot of things the player does that get reacted to. We just can’t let you undo that.

I can’t let you rewind a move that tripped an overwatch shot from an enemy unit that almost killed your guy, right? Yeah, I mean, you can save-scum. I think there are certain people that will play that way, and, you know… this is not a token I really want to take away from people, if you really want to be able to back up and revert a decision I think that’s entirely fair. But I don’t think that that’s the way you’re really meant to feel when you play these games, is thinking about where I can reload, or where I can undo. I want you to commit to decisions, be able to experience the consequence of those decisions, and so that’s kind of where I tend to fall on it.

There’s a lot of places where we’re very forgiving on decisions and margin of error, and being able to reassign points, be able to make decisions at your leisure, and I think that’s the right approach for the general audience, but certainly for me, I can be a very hardcore tactics player as well. I’ve played an immense amount of both XCOM 1 and XCOM 2, and a bunch of other games in this genre, and I like the permanence of decisions. For me, that’s part of the gameplay; I commit to something, it doesn’t work, I have to deal with the consequences of that thing that didn’t work.

GF: Yeah.

GC: Was there an iron man mode in there? I can’t remember from the main menu?

GF: Beskar mode.

GC: [laughs] In terms of the strategy element… I love the ant farm approach with XCOM, but this is obviously much more approachable. But I wasn’t clear whether there was a ticking clock or any way to lose the entire game via the strategy element alone?

JB: We don’t have a doomsday mechanic like XCOM does. I mean, to be honest, XCOM’s doomsday mechanic is a little bit more of a crutch than a way that the player is meant to fail the game, because it can be delayed almost indefinitely in XCOM 2.

But we do have a story, and the story missions… you cannot delay them indefinitely. You can delay them for small windows of time, but once you have the sense that the story is moving, you eventually have to commit to going on the story missions. And that does mean that the campaign does have a limited number of cycles [in-game days, essentially] that you can play before you have to do each of the story missions.

You can delay it a little bit, there’s some flex in there, it’s a little bit like an accordion. You can accelerate them and do them sooner – that will result in fewer missions before you complete the game, or you can delay them a little bit, and that variance window is, I think, around 10 cycles [in-game days]. 10 to 12 cycles, maybe.

GC: I always think it’s a good sign for a game’s storytelling when the side characters are memorable. I like the Rodian woman who was raised by droids…

JB: Disha is that character’s name.

GF: [laughs] Disha, yeah.

GC: And the separatist woman and the sassy medical droid. But you can still create your own characters like in XCOM, can’t you? You can customise them and start inventing personalities and histories for them, in your head. Where do you think the crossover is where you care more about an invented character of your own, versus a really well-written, voiced character?

JB: The last time I played through the entire game, I didn’t use any of the authored characters that time. I made my own squad of characters and by the time I complete the game, they’re real characters to me, right? I mean, I remember them, I remember their names, like, I fall in love with those characters and the identities that they create through their combat capabilities and such.

This time, I’m probably gonna use, as I play through the game, I’m gonna use some of the authored characters that I haven’t used as much. But there’s such a space there to play through this game six, seven times, and use different characters each time you do, to build your own characters.

You know, I want to make a lot of clone troopers, I want to make a lot of astromechs, whatever it is you want to do, you can take on a completely new narrative angle to how you’re experiencing the game every time you do it, and if you do care more about your own characters, you can just make your own characters. But if the authored characters earn a place in your heart, you can absolutely play with them, too.

GC: It’s actually getting relatively rare not to have pre-defined characters in a narrative game, but I still think I felt worse about my custom characters in XCOM dying than any voiced one.

JB: I think one of the things that I’ve always loved that we’re giving to Star Wars fans is the chance to make your own characters. Like, this existed to some extent in Star Wars games. You know, you can customise your main character or you can create a character in The Old Republic, for example, although that’s not nearly as, I think, context-heavy for the player playing that character, because it’s an MMO. But to be able to create your own group of characters, your own found family, and inject them into the Star Wars mythos is, like… that’s not something that I think any Star Wars game has ever actually done.

GC: The other thing I’m curious about is multiplayer, which you haven’t focused on a lot in your games… you guys must know what Laser Squad is?

JB: Yeah, kind of.

GC: It was the thing before XCOM and it was multiplayer-only. It looked terrible and old-fashioned when it came out, let alone now, but I wonder whether you’ve ever thought of making something along those lines?

JB: I’m pretty confident I know how Greg thinks about it as well, but my thought process on multiplayer for a tactics game is that it vacuums up all the oxygen in your game design space, and if you’re gonna make a multiplayer tactics game, that needs to be what you’re making. That needs to be top to bottom, the product that you’re trying to build, the experience that you’re trying to build, which of course, from not only a design side but a narrative side, an art side, a production side, is a very, very different beast to engage with.

And so, to do that to a quality level, where it will really engage players, I think that has to be what you’re trying to make. And trying to make a single-player tactics experience and a multiplayer tactics experience coexist on the same language of gameplay is going to be phenomenally difficult.

GC: I would be very happy for you to make Laser Squad 2.

JB: [laughs]

GC: Right, just before I go, I did have one nerdy Star Wars question, and I’m curious about this because I had the same issue with Star Wars Outlaws and so I’m not sure if this is something Lucasfilm is telling you to do or if it’s just a production limitation. I noticed all the aliens so far are just normal-sized humanoids, there’s none of the weirder ones like Hammerheads or Wookies or Dugs or any of the insect ones… they’re basically the ones that would just be a guy in a mask in the movies. And they almost all just speak English.

GF: Yeah, one of the things we were looking at, and I think we’ve got some non-English…

GC: But it’s pretty rare and not any of the named characters I met.

GF: But I think for us, we wanted the Coil to feel like it was made up from across the galaxy, and we also didn’t want to tie a specific species to a specific role. Since it is, this more cult-like group. And so for us, we’re trying to avoid kind of going down, pigeonholing a specific enemy type, with a specific species, so that was kind of the calculation there.

JB: There’s also a bit of a production constraint, since it’s easy to add additional species when we’re using the same material to create them in-game.

GC: I can see that, yeah. You’d need unique animation and all that.

JB: Back in the early days of production, I had a document that was 32 different species that I thought were worth including in the game. Eventually, of course, we have to pare that down to what we can realistically deliver. And one of the common constraints was aliens that have different limb dimensions, or limbs that operate in different ways that require additional work.

So, of course, we tend to filter towards the ones where we can use the same body of work, particularly animation work, across a bunch of different species without needing to redo everything from scratch in order to support something.

GC: I totally get it that. It’s just we talked about Star Wars being at its best when Jedi are more scarce but I also feel being weird, with the aliens and locations and vehicles, is important too. Return of the Jedi pushed that the furthest, with all these bizarre creatures with, as you say, non-human limb dimensions and the like. I do miss that in modern Star Wars media, in general.

GF: Yeah, yeah. I think that that’s one of those things where, you know, we’re still a startup, so who knows? If there’s a sequel, there could be some more exploration into that stuff, for sure.

GC: I’ll buy the DLC, I promise you.

JB: [laughs] I would love a situation where we make a Star Wars Zero Company 2 and I can get all 32 of those species. Nothing would make me happier! The number one thing I always want is more species to play. More characters to create.

GC: I would love to see that, but thanks very much for you time, twice, I really look forward to playing the full game.

GF: Awesome. Hopefully, the rest of the game continues to make you feel the same way, I think it will. We’re pretty happy with it.

JB: Some of our best stuff is coming up later.

GF: Yeah, you haven’t seen the great stuff yet. I think it gets… I think it’s very easy for games to kind of let off the gas pedal toward the end, because a lot of people don’t finish it, but if you stay for the ride with us there’s some really fun stuff.

GC: Well, thank you very much, guys. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you.

GF: Awesome. David, can’t wait to see what you think of the full game.

JB: Thank you!

Formats: PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £49.99
Publisher: EA
Developer: Bit Reactor and Respawn Entertainment
Release Date: 27th August 2026
Age Rating: 16

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