Even with the great Disney timeline purge of 2014, there's a lot of Star Wars lore to keep track of. If you're working on side quests for a game like Star Wars Zero Company, how do you get it all straight? The same way us casual fans do, apparently: spending a whole lot of time on Wookieepedia.
Zero Company features an array of side missions called operations, as detailed in the latest issue of PC Gamer, where you engage in non-combat objectives with an array of potential outcomes. One such side mission has you aiding the Beast Hunters of Onderon, a location introduced in the classic Tales of the Jedi comics and returned to modern canon thanks to the Clone Wars animated series.
Grayson Scantlebury, who serves as lead designer for operations, takes those callbacks seriously. "I've spent a lot of time poring through books or going on Wookieepedia and going, 'OK, I have a story I want to tell," Scantlebury tells PC Gamer. "What's a planet that makes sense during the Clone Wars era that I could tell that story?' Or vice versa: I'm just browsing through and going, 'Well, what happened on Bespin at this time, or Lothal at this time?'"
Some of the more intriguing lore bits tie back into the main cast, as well. One of the best parts of the Clone Wars series is the Umbara arc, where the clones are absolutely brutalized by local forces supported by the Separatists. Your main party includes both a clone trooper named Trick and the Umbaran sniper Luco Bronc, and there will be plenty of friction between the two unless you can build up their bonds in-game.
The character I'm most intrigued by is Runa Blask, who PC Gamer describes as "a dyed-in-the-wool Separatist partisan, forced out by internal politicking." She'll offer all kinds of criticisms of the Republic's imperialist ways, offering a perspective we don't often see in major Star Wars stories, where we're firmly placed on the Republic side to see the Separatists as mustache-twirling villains.
This all indicates a level of care for and curiosity about the Star Wars mythos that has me more intrigued than ever to see what Zero Company has in store.
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