Starting a new campaign in Star Wars Zero Company presents you with an unusually important choice before you have fired a single blaster: leave permadeath switched on, or turn it off.
It is not just another difficulty slider. With permadeath enabled, losing an Operator can become permanent, changing the shape of your squad and potentially the rest of your campaign. The setting is enabled by default, which tells you plenty about how Bit Reactor wants Zero Company to be played — but that does not automatically make it the right choice for everyone.
I encountered the choice immediately when setting up my first campaign on Xbox Series X. After spending time with the game’s opening setup, the question is obvious: should you actually leave permadeath on?
How permadeath works in Star Wars Zero Company
According to EA’s official Zero Company FAQ, permadeath is enabled by default, although players can switch it off when creating a campaign.
The important detail is that an Operator does not simply disappear the first time they fall in battle. StarWars.com’s official beginner guide explains that an Operator gains an Injury each time they are downed. If permadeath is enabled, accumulating three Injuries results in that Operator’s death.
That gives you some room to recover from mistakes, but repeated failures with the same character can still carry a lasting cost. EA’s official tactics guide says injured Operators can be sent to the Medbay after battle to help them recover. Hawks is the exception to the normal permadeath rules: if Hawks is defeated, the mission immediately fails and must be restarted rather than Hawks being permanently removed from the squad.
You cannot change the setting halfway through
This is the part worth knowing before you press Start Campaign. EA’s official tactics guide says your Permadeath and Beskar Mode choices are locked to that campaign once you select Start Campaign.
If you begin with permadeath switched on, it stays on for that entire campaign. If you later decide you would rather play without it, you will need to start a new campaign.
That makes the initial choice more meaningful than the usual accessibility or difficulty toggle. It is effectively a commitment to the way you want Zero Company to treat failure.
Should you leave permadeath on?
For most players, I would leave it on for a first campaign.
That recommendation is not about making the game artificially harder. It is about preserving one of the systems that appears central to Zero Company’s identity. EA itself says permadeath is intended to create a sense of loss and of continuing after that loss — something the developer sees as fitting one of Star Wars’ recurring themes.
Knowing an Operator can eventually be lost should also make tactical decisions carry more weight. Sending someone into a poor position, failing to protect an injured squad member or repeatedly relying on the same Operator suddenly matters beyond a single mission result.
For a tactics game, that tension can be valuable. The best decisions are often the ones you make because you are trying to preserve the team rather than simply maximise damage.
When turning permadeath off makes sense
There are still perfectly good reasons to disable it.
- You are new to turn-based tactics and want to learn the systems without worrying about permanently losing characters.
- You are mainly playing for the Clone Wars story and would rather avoid long-term punishment for tactical mistakes.
- You prefer experimenting aggressively with squad combinations rather than protecting experienced Operators.
- You know permanent character loss is more likely to frustrate you than improve the experience.
Zero Company is clearly designed to accommodate that choice. StarWars.com’s own guide describes the game as being built for Star Wars fans across different levels of tactics experience, and EA explicitly encourages players to adjust the settings to create the experience that suits them.
Permadeath and Beskar Mode are not the same thing
It is also worth separating permadeath from Beskar Mode, because both appear on the campaign setup screen and they do very different jobs.
Permadeath determines whether Operators can be permanently lost after accumulating enough Injuries. Beskar Mode instead changes how saving works: EA says it limits the campaign to a single save and removes manual saving, making your choices and their consequences much harder to undo.
That deserves its own explanation, so we will cover Beskar Mode separately rather than treating the two settings as interchangeable.
A good fit for Zero Company’s squad-based approach
Zero Company is built around an unconventional squad operating during the twilight of the Clone Wars, with individual Operators bringing different strengths and roles into battle. Permanent loss therefore has the potential to affect more than your immediate combat power — it changes the people you have available to build that squad around.
That emphasis on character and consequence is one of the more interesting differences between Zero Company and more traditional action-led Star Wars games. We have previously looked at that other side of the franchise in our Star Wars Outlaws review on Xbox Series X, but Zero Company’s tactical structure asks for a very different kind of decision-making.
Tech Torque Verdict
Leave permadeath on unless you already know permanent character loss will get in the way of your enjoyment.
The three-Injury system gives you a buffer before a character is permanently lost, while still making mistakes matter. More importantly, permadeath appears to reinforce the squad management and consequence-driven structure that Zero Company is built around.
If you are completely new to tactics games, switching it off is a sensible way to learn without pressure. For everyone else, keeping the default setting looks like the more interesting first playthrough.
Tech Torque Media is playing Star Wars Zero Company on Xbox Series X. We will be following this guide with a closer look at Beskar Mode before our full review.
