The slight on-theme pun in the headline wasn’t on purpose I promise
I’ve already spoken once today about my intrigue around permanency today, so why not keep that train running. Star Wars Zero Company, a strategy game with XCOM in its veins and execution, is continuing on its spiritual predecessors lineage by having the most controversial of all video deaths as a main feature: permadeath.
Yes, any alien squadmates you build up and get overly attached to can’t do a Darth Sidious and come back without any explanation. Once they’re dead, they’re dead. But this isn’t a feature that everyone, including narrative lead Aaron Contreras, was happy with. Speaking with PC Gamer, Contreras explained that “there were some fights” at developer Bit Reactor “around how much do we want to limit the impact that a character like [Umbaran sniper] Luco Bronc can have in the story when they can catch a blaster bolt in the face really early on and then they’re gone forever.”
As you’ll already have gathered, Contreras didn’t come out the victor regarding permadeath. That doesn’t mean he’s against it even still, though, in fact it’s the opposite. “Frankly, it was absolutely the right decision, and it made it easier to support parity between our authored operators and our custom operators – the ones that the player creates out of whole cloth – because even those operators have their own personalities and backgrounds and specializations,” Contreras said.
When it comes to those more hand-crafted characters like Luco, Bit Reactor did find a solution, which is essentially that they’ll have some narrative shenanigans going on meaning they can’t die early on. But once they’re a part of your team, “they’re very vulnerable, and it’s up to you to keep them alive and make sure they’re part of the team.”
Bit Reactor co-founder Greg Foertsch in particular felt that having permadeath in the game was sticking with the ethos of the series. “Star Wars is about loss. I mean, four years old, watching Obi Wan Kenobi die, right?” Foertsch said. “It’s about loss – and 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.”
I understand people’s penchant for save scumming, we often want to get everything we can out of a game. I also think we shouldn’t always get everything we want, not in stories, anyway. If character deaths are meant to be meaningful, then we should accept them! Admittedly it’s a not a pleasant thing to be forced to accept, but hey ho, it’s not like the world is short on Star Wars games.
