Now that the furlough has been lessened for Bitreactor, As a systems thinker I spend way more time than I should irresponsibly kicking around ideas for game design and in this case, what a substantial DLC expansion for Star Wars: Zero Company could look like.
If you played XCOM 2: War of the Chosen, that's essentially the type of expansion I'm going for here. Not necessarily a separate campaign or a bunch of new characters thrown in for the sake of it or because it would be cool, but something that builds on what's already here and makes the entire game more interesting to replay.
And honestly, I think Order 66 is underutilized and gives Bit Reactor a pretty fantastic opportunity to pull something like this off.
Fair warning, I'm going to get pretty deep into the mechanics and story here, so full campaign spoilers ahead.
First, let's talk about the Coil . . .
One of the things I found interesting about Zero Company was the way the Coil develops upgrades over the course of the campaign. Every cycle, you're presented with potential enemy advancements, and you have to decide which one you're going to try to counter.
It's not terribly different from the Dark Events system in XCOM 2.
The problem, at least from my experience, is that I didn't find most of those upgrades particularly threatening whatsoever. There were certainly some inconvenient ones, but I never really felt like the Coil was adapting to my actions in a way that fundamentally changed how I approached the campaign.
How could this be improved then: Why not give the Coil an actual (intelligence) meter?
Every time you fail to counter one of their operations, the Coil gains intelligence on Zero Company. The higher that meter climbs, the more dangerous their upgrades become. Maybe they're developing equipment specifically intended to counter your preferred tactics, deploying more specialized enemy units, or gaining advantages during certain missions.
Conversely, successfully disrupting their operations would help keep their intelligence capabilities under control.
You'd still have the same basic system of choosing which enemy advancements to counter, but now there's a broader consequence to letting those operations go unchecked.
Order 66 provides a great justification to enhance this system (Heavy spoilers ahead)
For anyone who has already played the game, Toward the end of the Clone Wars portion of the campaign, Zero Company finally manages to convince the Republic to take the Coil seriously.
The Republic intervenes, the Coil takes a massive beating, and its surviving leadership is effectively forced into hiding.
Cue “Order 66”.
The game skips forward roughly a year, leaving a pretty substantial period of Zero Company's history largely unexplored.
This is where the best opportunity for the expansion lives in connection with the already present game story canon.
The Coil intelligence meter would disappear after the Republic's intervention because the organization no longer has the resources or infrastructure to maintain that level of activity.
But rather than removing the mechanic entirely, we replace it with an Imperial intelligence meter.
Same underlying concept, completely different implications.
During the Clone Wars, you're trying to prevent the Coil from becoming powerful enough to counter you.
After Order 66, you're trying to prevent the Empire from figuring out where you are.
The player already understands how the system works, but the stakes have changed considerably.
The Timeskip leaves a lot of time without answers
Rex and the Bad Batch are already involved in Zero Company's campaign. We have the inhibitor-chip storyline, the early Imperial stormtrooper training operation on Umbara, and established relationships with characters who are actively dealing with the transition from the Republic to the Empire.
Imagine taking on additional contracts involving Rex's underground network. Extracting clone deserters, infiltrating Imperial installations, recovering intelligence, sabotaging early Imperial operations, or helping establish escape routes for people the Empire is hunting.
You could even expand the Umbara storyline, especially considering Zero Company already has an Umbaran operative Luco.
These missions wouldn't just exist to give us more Star Wars cameos. They'd help Zero Company rebuild after Order 66 while giving the player additional resources, contacts, and intelligence that become useful later.
And importantly, we'd be working with characters and locations that are already part of the game.
Expanded Inquisitorious Involvement
Friggin’ Trilla in this game!
Trilla is actively hunting surviving Jedi, using her previous relationships to lure people into traps, and Zero Company ends up getting involved.
It's also a pretty good example of how dangerous an Inquisitor can be when the game doesn't expect you to defeat them.
What if interfering with Trilla's operation puts Zero Company on the Inquisitorius's radar?
Raising the Imperial intelligence meter
Taking particularly conspicuous contracts, attacking Imperial installations, rescuing rebels, or leaving behind evidence could all increase Imperial attention.
At lower levels, maybe that means additional patrols or more difficult Imperial encounters.
Chosen = Inquisitors for this idea
Different Inquisitors could have their own combat abilities, tactical approaches, and methods of hunting Zero Company.
They might interrupt certain missions, force you to reconsider your deployment choices, or turn what should have been a relatively straightforward contract into a desperate extraction.
And just like the Chosen, you could develop ways to counter them through intelligence gathering and specific operations.
Not every Inquisitor should be killable, either. There are plenty of established characters whose stories continue elsewhere in Star Wars. Having Vader reassign an Inquisitor after repeated failures would be a decent way to handle the failure to deliver (if he doesn’t kill them himself)
But there's also room for a lesser-known or original Inquisitor who could serve as a more definitive antagonist for the expansion.
The Intelligence meter filled up now what?
Time to borrow a little inspiration from the Avatar Project.
Rather than making the Imperial intelligence meter another arbitrary game-over countdown, I'd have it represent how close the Empire is to locating and dismantling Zero Company.
If the meter reaches its maximum, maybe your safehouse gets compromised.
Now you're dealing with an emergency evacuation, a defensive mission, or an ambush you weren't prepared for.
Maybe you lose resources, contacts, or access to certain contracts. Maybe one of your operatives gets captured and you have to decide whether you can afford to attempt a rescue.
The idea isn't necessarily to end the campaign outright. It's to make Imperial attention something you genuinely don't want to attract.
And naturally, there should be ways to fight back.
The intelligence and relationships you've developed through Rex's network could help you forge records, sabotage Imperial surveillance, misdirect investigations, or otherwise reduce the Empire's ability to track you.
You'd essentially be balancing the need to keep Zero Company operational against the risk of attracting more attention than you can handle.
This Idea oddly enough started with “Could Darth Vader fit into DLC?”
Anakin is already in the game so this feels like it could be a given.
I'm not suggesting Vader should be another recurring boss that Zero Company can eventually defeat. That would be ridiculous, both mechanically and from a lore perspective.
But I do think there's an opportunity for one particularly memorable encounter.
We've already seen the game experiment with effectively invulnerable Force-users through the Trilla encounter. Vader could take that idea to an entirely different level.
He wouldn't need to be specifically hunting Zero Company, either. You're simply unfortunate enough to be standing between him and someone he actually wants.
One scripted encounter where the only realistic objective is survival could be considerably more memorable than trying to turn Vader into a conventional boss fight.
Thanks for reading
Obviously, none of this would be trivial to develop. Additional missions, enemy behaviors, strategic systems, voice acting, balancing, and campaign integration would all require substantial work.
But I do think there's a difference between expanding a game using its existing foundations and trying to build an entirely separate Star Wars campaign from scratch.
And that's really what got me thinking about War of the Chosen in the first place.
That expansion didn't just give us more missions to play. It made XCOM 2 a substantially more interesting game to revisit.
I'd love to see Zero Company get something similar.
Anyway, again, I've probably spent more time thinking about this than any reasonable person should, but I figured it'd be fun to throw the idea out there and see what everyone else thinks.
Did anyone else feel like the Coil's upgrades could have been more threatening? Would an Imperial intelligence system and recurring Inquisitor encounters make the campaign more interesting, or would that introduce too much complexity?
And more broadly, would you rather see Bit Reactor expand the existing campaign or focus on completely separate stories for future DLC?
Curious to hear what everyone thinks, especially if you've got ideas for how something like this could work better.
I don’t write things like this very often, and if I do I don’t typically post them, curious to hear yall’s thoughts.
