'Early on in the 2000s, we got enamored with consoles and I think certain games didn't make the leap right:⁠' Star Wars Zero Company's director has a theory about why old school PC gaming genres are back with a vengeance

Greg Foertsch, creative director on the upcoming Star Wars Zero Company, gave his take on the resurgence of crustier PC gaming genres like RTS and turn-based tactics over the last decade in a recent interview with PCG associate editor Ted Litchfield. He also explained why he thinks there was such a long fallow period for complex, simmy games in the aughts and early 2010s.

If you love grand strategy, 4X, turn-based tactics, RTS, CRPGs, and so on, there were several decades where you needed a PC to get the full lay of the land, and even then it was slim pickings for a while. You could certainly find these genres finding success on consoles here and there with games like Fire Emblem, Halo Wars, and Dragon Age: Origins, but countless classics were gated by InstallShield wizards and newbie-hostile forum lords who refused to explain what "THAC0" was.

That's less true these days—Age of Empires plays great on a controller, Baldur's Gate 3 is a cross-platform mega hit, and in defiance of all common sense, Company of Heroes is on Nintendo Switch.

"Early on in the 2000s, we got enamored with consoles," Foertsch explained. "And I think certain games didn't make the leap right⁠—the technology reasons, whatever it was, they couldn't make that conversion. A lot of tactics games you look at, they had an isometric sprite based thing. And the way they delivered the content, it never embraced the camera as a tool."

"Camera as a tool" is a line that really struck us: You can see what he's talking about with the cinematic kill cams of XCOM, which Foertsch and many of his colleagues worked on, and contrast that with the pre-rendered, 2.5D art of so many '90s tactics and strategy games. It's a classic look, but also a particularly bad fit for lower TV resolutions viewed from further away than a monitor.

Foertsch reckons it took awhile for the UX and camera tech to innovate in the right directions, but as it catches up, it's approaching the level of comfort you can expect from keyboard and mouse. "You're starting to see some of these games and genres that maybe had a difficult transition to the couch, actually being games that are that are great to play on the couch," he said. "A lot of my PC games, I'll play with controller, and some of them feel great.

"The explosion of turn-based tactics since 2012 is amazing. You'll see some things that are consistent and threads that go through them, but then you're also seeing things where people are really taking some innovative approaches and trying to really change it and question some stuff and push the genre forward. Hopefully people are just [going to say] 'a great game is a great game,' and look at it from that perspective."

He added that the more games there are solving these problems, the easier it gets to see what works and what doesn't and, in turn, innovate further. "It's great to see other people's solutions to problems that we faced, and how did they get around that? What did they do? What choices did they make? Because these games are deceptively hard⁠—they look easy⁠—but they are deceptively hard to make."

You can read Ted's full Zero Company preview here to get more insights from Bit Reactor developers and learn more about the upcoming tactics game, which is shaping up to be a hell of a lot more than just 'Star Wars plus XCOM.' After that, feed your unceasing hunger for timely information with our guide article that gives you everything you need to know about Zero Company.