Star Wars Zero Company: How Your Decisions Actually Change the Game
Every game with dialogue choices claims your decisions matter. Most of the time what that means is a slightly different line of dialogue and the same outcome. Star Wars Zero Company is not doing that, and I only found out how much it is not doing that by comparing my campaign against someone else’s.
I have been talking through this playthrough with MustafarNathan, who has been running his own campaign in parallel. We made different calls at three separate points, and the result is that we are effectively describing two different games. I want to walk through those three, because they illustrate something worth knowing before you start.
The system driving this is called Dilemmas, and it is worth understanding that these are not menu prompts with a good option and a bad option. They are situations where two of your people want incompatible things and you have to pick one.
Cly Kullervo Walked Out of My Campaign
Cly Kullervo is the Mandalorian bounty hunter, one of the last surviving members of Clan Verminoth, and she joined Zero Company for revenge rather than any belief in the cause. She is also the only operator who can wear Mandalorian armor, and she is voiced by Alex McKenna, who Red Dead Redemption 2 players will know as Sadie Adler.
Cly came to me at the Den with a problem involving Bennic Halloren, our Republic Intelligence officer. She wanted it addressed. I told her to let it go, because I was trying to avoid drama on a team that already has plenty of it.
She did not accept that. She pushed, and I told her to let it go a second time.
She left. Permanently. Not sidelined, not sulking in the Den, gone from my roster for the rest of the campaign, taking the game’s only Mandalorian class with her.
And then the game twisted the knife. Neesh Renark sent me a datapad message saying that letting her go was a mistake, and that message does not go away. It sits there. I cannot dismiss it. Every time I go to the armory, there it is.
That is a remarkable piece of design. The game did not fail me or hand me a game over. It just quietly refused to let me stop thinking about it.
MustafarNathan handled that same Dilemma differently and still has Cly on his roster. Same game, and one of us has a Mandalorian and one of us has a note we cannot delete.
Umbara: Whether You Show Up for Your People
Luco Bronc is the Umbaran sharpshooter, a former soldier who defended Umbara against the Republic invasion and has never forgiven them for it. He is one of the more prickly members of the squad, and given that we have a clone trooper on the same roster, his presence causes real friction.
At Umbara, the game asks whether Zero Company shows up for him.
I fought that mission. Nathan did not, and Luco went off and handled it on his own.
I felt strongly that this was a moment to demonstrate support for a team member, particularly one who has every reason to expect that we would not. Luco’s entire characterization is built around being an outsider on a team that fought for the side that occupied his homeworld. Choosing to put the whole company behind him at the one place where that history is most raw seemed like the point of the sequence.
I do not know yet what Nathan’s version costs him or gains him. That is sort of the thing about this game. Neither of us can tell the other what would have happened.
SPOILER WARNING
Everything below this line discusses the final mission of Star Wars Zero Company, including a major story development. If you have not finished the campaign, stop here.
Order 66, and the Cost of Bringing Trick
The final mission is the one where Order 66 comes down and Palpatine’s speech reframes the entire war you have been fighting. It is the best sequence in the game and I am not going to describe the story beats.
But the squad selection decision in front of it is a perfect illustration of what this article is about.
I chose to take Trick with me. He is the clone trooper, Hawks’ longest-serving companion, and after everything the two of them have been through it did not occur to me to leave him behind. That felt like the only choice a person could make.
Nathan did not take Trick.
Here is the result. I went into that fight against the clone troopers with three. Nathan went in with four operators of his own, and Trick joined the battle automatically on top of them. Five against my three.
Sit with that for a second. The emotionally correct decision — bring your oldest friend to the moment that matters most — is mechanically the worse one. Leaving him behind gets you both a fuller squad and Trick anyway.
I do not think that is a balance oversight. A game that puts a permanent, undismissable note in your inbox for losing a squad member is not accidentally punishing loyalty. It is asking whether you would make the same call knowing what it costs.
I would. But it made the last mission considerably harder, and I want people going in to understand that squad selection screen is doing more than it appears to be.
Why This Matters
The reason to write about any of this is that Zero Company is not a game you can fully describe from one playthrough. My campaign lost a Mandalorian and fought the ending shorthanded. Nathan’s kept her and let an Umbaran fight alone.
That is real branching, backed up by permadeath, a memorial wall that records your failures permanently, and a relationship system with actual mechanical weight. It is also why the New Game Plus option is more than a formality here — a second run is not the same run with better gear.
If you are starting this game, my advice is to make the decision you actually believe in rather than the one you think the game wants. Zero Company is built to make you live with it either way, and that is the most interesting thing about it.
TL;DR: Decisions That Branch
- Dilemmas put two operators’ needs in direct conflict. There is often no option that satisfies everyone.
- Telling Cly Kullervo to drop her issue with Bennic Halloren twice removes her from the roster permanently, along with the only Mandalorian class in the game.
- Neesh Renark then sends a datapad message about that decision that cannot be dismissed for the rest of the campaign.
- Fighting the Umbara mission alongside Luco Bronc versus letting him handle it alone produces meaningfully different runs.
- Spoiler: taking Trick on the final mission costs you a squad slot. Leaving him behind gives you a full squad andTrick as an automatic addition.
- Permadeath, the memorial, and the Bond system mean two playthroughs of this game genuinely differ.
I have compared notes with one other player and found three major divergences. There are almost certainly more. If you have played through and hit a branch I have not mentioned, I would be curious to hear about it.