Star Wars Zero Company will be released without official mod support

Star Wars Zero Company, due out later this month, will not have official mod support.

Bit Reactor confirmed the decision during a recent Q&A with the community, saying that the studio has "great respect for the modding community" but has no plans to provide official modding tools for the game at this time.

For a regular Star Wars movie, this might go unnoticed.

For a turn-based tactics game created by a studio staffed by former XCOM developers, this is somewhat unexpected.

Why mod support is important for XCOM

Mods have played a huge role in keeping XCOM 2 alive long after its initial release.

Players created new classes, enemies, weapons, maps, cosmetics, balance changes, and ultimately massive overhauls that could turn the entire campaign into a completely different game.

Naturally, this story created certain expectations around Zero Company.Bit Reactor never promised that its Star Wars tactical game would simply beXCOM 3in clone armor, but comparisons to the project have followed it from the very beginning.

Both games feature turn-based battles, squad development, base management, character relationships, and the possibility of permanently losing valuable soldiers.

Official modding tools could allow players to expand this structure by adding new armor, operators, missions, planets, and enemies from across the Star Wars stories.

However, these tools are not included in the plans at the moment.

Unofficial modifications may still appear.

Lack of official support does not necessarily mean that PC players will never mod the game.

Dedicated communities have spent decades modding Star Wars games that weren't originally designed for modding. If Zero Company had the files available and enough interested parties, small, unofficial projects would almost certainly be attempted.

The difference is that content creators will not receive any special tools, documentation, or official support from Bit Reactor.

This tends to make large-scale modifications much more difficult to build, maintain, and install.

This also means that players shouldn't assume that Zero Company will eventually get its own equivalent of XCOM 2's most ambitious community additions.

Bit Reactor is focused on launch.

The studio's current priority is releasing the main game rather than promising years of additional support.

Bit Reactor has also confirmed that there are no plans for a New Game+ mode, and no decisions have been made regarding future content.The campaign is expected to take approximately 30 to 40 hours to complete, depending on the difficulty and experience of the player in tactical games.

This puts additional pressure on the launch version of the game to provide ample replay value through difficulty settings, squad composition, permadeath, operator development, and tactical experimentation.

At least the game won't be built on microtransactions. As we wrote in a previous report, Zero Company will avoid microtransactions, although some cosmetic armor items will still only be available in the Deluxe Edition.

Players will also have a selection of hand-crafted planets and battlefields to explore, which we covered in our guide to the worlds featured for Star Wars Zero Company.

A missed opportunity, but not a disaster.

Official mod support would be a huge advantage, especially on PC.

A tactical game with customizable soldiers, Star Wars factions and decades of history, suspiciously well suited for expansion at the expense of the community. Somewhere, someone is already planning to create a squad consisting entirely of obscure clone battalions, and refuses to admit that the necessary tools do not exist.

However, the presence of mod support is not a determining factor in the success of the main campaign.

First and foremost, Zero Company must provide quality tactical combat, memorable operators, meaningful casualties, and missions worth replaying.Everything else comes later.

The game will be released on August 27 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.

In our complete guide to Star Wars Zero Company you can check out all the confirmed features, characters, editions and gameplay details.

For now, players should expect an elaborate Star Wars tactics game rather than an official galactic construction set.