The Star Wars franchise hasn’t been afraid to pull the trigger and send several fan-favorite characters to an early grave, and that’s a tradition that’ll continue in Star Wars: Zero Company. While the game is drawing many parallels to XCOM, it looks like it also has a few Fire Emblem influences, as a permadeath mode will make almost every single character one with the Force if you bungle your battlefield tactics.
Speaking to PC Gamer (via GamesRadar), narrative lead Aaron Contreras–who was also lead writer on the Star Wars Jedi games at Respawn–revealed that permadeath had been added deep into the development of the game. The gameplay system that developer Bit Reactor came up won’t see a character removed from the board if their health drops to zero. Instead, these defeats will count as battlefield injuries, and after they accumulate three of them, they’ll be out of the game. The game’s protagonist, Hawks, is the only character who permadeath doesn’t apply to, due to his central role in the game.
“It was a challenge that we embraced midway through production,” Contreras said. “About 13 months ago I lost an argument about permadeath, and it was good that I did, it was the right decision for the game. Star Wars is about loss. I mean, four years old, watching Obi Wan Kenobi die, right? It’s about loss, and then also, as a developer, wanting people to not save-scum, but to push through the loss, to what’s on the other side of the experience, to feel it.”
That did make development on Zero Company more difficult, but Contreras said that the development team rolled up its sleeve and got to work on adding this extra layer of risk to Zero Company.
Zero Company is one of several Star Wars games in development currently, and later this year, fans can hop into a sci-fi chariot for some Outer Rim thrills in Star Wars: Galactic Racer. While other games like Star Wars Jedi 3, the Knights of the Old Republic remake, and Star Wars: Eclipse are also simmering away in various development ovens, one of the new games on the horizon is Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic. Production is being led by BioWare veteran Casey Hudson, and this spiritual successor to Knights of the Old Republic is aiming to be out before the end of the decade.
