If you are hesitant about Star Wars Zero Companyyou should know what you might be getting yourself into. The game currently has an overall critical score of 85 on Metacritic, making it one of the best reviewed Star Wars games in recent memory. When it comes to story and gameplay, this is a masterfully executed tactics game in the style of X-COM with memorable characters. What none of the reviews I read or watched mentioned is that Society Zero is also kind of a technical mess.
On PC, the game has all the markings of a crazy version of Unreal Engine 5. I’m using a system with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, an RTX 5060 Ti, and 16GB of RAM, and I’m getting constant traversal stutter and input lag when trying to play the game with a mouse and keyboard. I also encountered a bug that required me to restart the same mission twice. Yes, you could say I’m running the game on a glorified RTX 3070, but even those with more powerful GPUs like the RTX 5090 complain of poor performance. On Steam, the game has a “mostly positive” rating from nearly 9,000 reviews, and yet almost every one of those reviews mentions stutters, game-breaking bugs, and crashes.
“I started having a good time,” one negative review begins. “Then came the crashes. It crashed almost every hour, so I had to save every few minutes. The times I forgot to save, I had to replay the entire section. Of course, it only crashed when I was about to complete a mission.” On Reddit, console gamers are complaining about their own problems. YouTuber Daniel Owen also made a video discussing the game’s PC issues. While I haven’t played the Xbox Series or PlayStation 5 ports, there are similar reports of crashes and stutters floating around the internet for each.
The experience of playing Society Zero is frustratingly similar to another recent game UE5 Star Wars, Jedi: Survivor. As I wrote in 2023, this game was broken when it came out. It suffered from constant stuttering and shader compilation stuttering on PC, which meant the game would constantly crash, even on high-end systems. For NVIDIA users, the game also comes without DLSS support. Even after nearly a dozen major fixes, Jedi: Survivor still stutters on PC. At this point, I’ve given up hope that the game will ever run smoothly; Respawn Entertainment, Jedi: SurvivorThe developer of , has not released a new patch in almost two years.
Unfortunately, I can’t say for sure Society Zero will receive even a fraction of the post-release support that Jedi: Survivor obtained from Respawn. Indeed, although Electronic Arts published both games, the new one was made by an independent studio called Bit Reactor, not a direct subsidiary, and its future depends on whether Society Zero sells enough copies.
Monday, Game files Stephen Totilo reported that Bit Reactor had laid off the majority of its staff a few weeks prior. Society Zero released August 27. A source told Totilo that up to 80 percent of the studio’s employees are not being paid at the moment. Another source told him that only a skeleton crew remained, “ready to tackle any problem.” Society Zero post-launch bugs.” A Bit Reactor spokesperson told Totilo that the studio hoped to bring back furloughed workers with wages restored, a promise that employees he spoke with said they weren’t sure it would be able to keep, even if the game was a commercial success. The studio is also embroiled in a legal dispute between its co-founders that won’t go to trial until early 2027.
If what’s left of Bit Reactor strives to resolve Society Zero numerous bugs and performance issues, the studio’s only public statement on this subject is not reassuring. On the day of the game’s release, he simply stated on the Steam community forums that he was aware of “emerging issues (CPU crashes and threading)” and was working on implementing fixes. “We will let you know when we are able to provide an update,” it adds.
On the face of it, that’s a pretty nice statement, but it was released before the news about her roster was released, and she hasn’t said anything since. EA and Bit Reactor did not immediately respond to Woozad’s request for comment, asking what support, if any, the game would receive post-release.
If you are considering purchasing Society Zerojust know that it may not be in better condition than it is now. You might think I’m being too pessimistic, but I want to point out that it took Respawn, a studio with full financial backing from EA, a year and a half to get Jedi: Survivor to its current state. Another comparison here is equally illustrative. Cold Symmetry, the independent studio behind Deadly Shell II last Saturday, it announced a major “first week” update for its new game, which was released seven days ago. Society Zero. These two comparisons give an idea of the potentially difficult road ahead for Bit Reactor, but also of what an independent studio can do when it has a full staff. Right away, Society Zero Doesn’t that have advantages?
