Star Wars Zero Company Difficulty: Choose Your First Run

For your first Star Wars Zero Company difficulty choice, start on Normal without Beskar. Choose Story for a relaxed introduction or Hard when you already enjoy tactical positioning and roster management. Decide about Permadeath separately: a harder battle and an irreversible campaign are different commitments.

First-campaign decision table

This is a starting recommendation, not a ranking of legitimate ways to play. The official StarWars.com guide confirms that the difficulty level can be adjusted outside combat. Change the level between encounters if it prevents you enjoying the campaign; do not assume that this also changes the campaign’s permanent modifiers.

Where to find the difficulty setting

EA’s accessibility resources list Story, Normal, Hard and Expert and show the Difficulty control under Options → Gameplay → Challenge.

Use the right-hand explanation to check what the selected mode changes. Keep battle difficulty separate from the mission’s own Risky/Dangerous/Extreme rating, which the official getting-started guide describes as a deployment consideration.

What to expect from Story, Normal, Hard and Expert

Story suits a narrative-focused campaign. Normal is our default for learning. Move up to Hard when mistakes should put real pressure on your turn planning; use Expert after you can recover from a failed opening without relying on the same plan every fight.

For higher modes, check weapon reach, available recovery and the health of your replacement roster before deployment. The community difficulty reference reports that Hard and Expert remove the Bacta Tank’s instant-recovery option. That is community-documented game behavior, not a modifier this Wiki independently tested. Read your current mode description and Medbay before planning around it.

Permadeath: decide what a loss should mean

EA lists Permadeath as a configurable option. The official launch guide explains the injury-based permanent-loss risk. Enabling it makes recovery and healthy replacements important even when you keep normal save control.

Our recommendation: keep it off if losing a favorite character would spoil the campaign; enable it if rebuilding after a loss is part of the appeal. Check the campaign-setup screen’s available choices and restrictions for your selected level before confirming. See injuries and Medbay recovery for roster planning.

Beskar: understand the save commitment

The community reference describes Beskar as the ironman-style campaign option: a single persistent save and no manual saving. Treat it as a campaign-start commitment, rather than an extra combat-difficulty level.

Leave it off for a first run if you want room to correct misunderstood rules or recover from technical failures. EA’s September 9 Patch 1.1 notes document fixes involving Beskar saves and crashes. Those are historical fixes, not a promise that every current failure has been eliminated.

Before confirming a new campaign

• Read the selected difficulty’s complete explanation.
• Choose permanent-loss rules for the story experience you want.
• Confirm the Beskar save restriction before starting.
• Prepare a replacement for each essential squad job, using Best Squad.
• For a new PC installation, test ordinary play with our crash troubleshooting guide before committing to a single-save run.

Sources and review

Checked October 12, 2026: EA’s difficulty and accessibility settings, StarWars.com’s launch guide and EA Patch 1.1. Beskar’s save restrictions and the higher-mode recovery note are attributed to Zero Command’s community difficulty documentation. The recommendations above are editorial decisions, not results of our own comparative playtest.