Early on in Wings of Liberty, you get a mission from someone named Tosh. He’s a stranger but a capable one, whose interests seem to align with yours.

He’s Jamaican. Well, okay, that makes no sense – he was born lightyears away from Earth, which is famously where Jamaica is. But he’s dark-skinned with dreadlocks, the accent and a fondness for voodoo. He plays with a blade and a voodoo doll while wearing a tight, glowing spacesuit – a fun mix of old world and new tech.

The story that unfolds over his missions is a mess. It’s close to brilliant but hamstrung by some weird and awful writing.

To appreciate how, let’s move through the Tosh subplot together.

Mission: The Devil’s Playground

Tosh contacts you and says he has a job. Working together, you can get some much-needed cash to help fund the revolution.

He knows of a planet called Redstone. The minerals there are rare and valuable – harvest them and you’ll make a lot of money. Tosh knows where the best mineral deposits are, but he needs help harvesting them.

The first problem: the planet is unstable. Lava rises and falls periodically.

The second: the Zerg are here.

This is Resource Accumulation / Cycle mission. You win when you have enough minerals in the bank – a concept Blizzard enjoys playing with. Warcraft and Brood War had missions with objectives like this too. It’s an interesting dynamic, encouraging you to be efficient with your spending.

How much do you spent on your forces? As little as possible.

This mission introduces the Reaper. Tosh has criminal contacts and is a little unhinged, so it makes sense that his forces would charge into battle with jetpacks and without armour. Reapers move fast, can scale cliffs and attack quickly. They’re fragile, though, needing to flee rather than stand and fight.

It’s a good fit for the mission, as your base is spread out, covering both low and high ground. The low ground contains the minerals, but periodically fills with lava that wipes out everything. It’s also a good tutorial for how mobile Terran bases can be.

This mission has a flexible approach. You can choose to mine from one or two places using a small, cheap force for protection. Or you can mine from multiple places across the map, using a larger force to defend a spread out base. Or you can take the fight to the Zerg and steal their resources. Combining strategies will keep you busy but get you there faster.

The bad design? If you wipe out the Zerg, there’s nothing to harm you but the lava. It makes for a dull experience then. Defeating the Zerg here should lessen their attacks but should never prevent them – I’d make Overlords drop in attack waves periodically.

Mission: Welcome to the Jungle

Tosh has another lead on some valuable resources: folks will pay well for a gas called terrazine. There’s some on a Protoss planet, but these aren’t friendly Protoss. These are an evil faction – warlike, xenophobic and fanatically devoted to the Xel’Naga.

Raynor just wants to harvest terrazine and leave. The Protoss see it as sacred, though, and will fight to stop you.

This is a Map Control mission. There are terrazine geysers scattered across the battlefield. You need to get a worker to a geyser, defend it for a while and then escort it back to base. Do that at seven different geysers and you win.

Meanwhile, the Protoss are trying to do the same thing – their workers seal off the geysers instead of harvesting from them, but either way that geyser becomes unusable.

You unlock the Goliath here, which is a unit we’ve already seen.

The intended way to play is with a mobile force. You attack them as they try to seal geysers, you defend your worker as you’re harvesting, then you pull back to base. You could, however, fortify a few chokepoints to keep them leaving their base. It’s even possible to attack their base directly – and if you wipe them out, the mission ends in victory. There’s no need to harvest the gas without anyone to stop you – which is weird you had to do it last mission.

The Tosh Story

If you talk to Tosh and the others between missions, you get the sense that all is not as it seems.

He, like you, hates Mengsk. He was part of a secret program to train psionic assassins – called Spectres - before Mengsk arrested him and his men.

Tosh is mysterious – nay, evasive. The story implies that he orchestrated a terrorist attack against Mengsk that lead to many innocent civilian casualties, which the media blamed on Raynor’s Raiders. Raynor even says that they can’t win this revolution unless they’re sure of their allies – and they definitely aren’t sure of Tosh.

See, Tosh isn’t a troubled hero. He’s not a dark antihero. He’s a villain who just happens to hate your enemy. Spectres aren’t criminals like Raynor and Tychus, who are romanticised cowboy outlaws. Spectres are murderous terrorists with no regard for innocent life.

That’s what the story tells you before giving you a weird choice.

Wings of Liberty introduces split missions. Some missions have two versions of them and you choose which one to play at the start. This increases replayability and they have different rewards, so it makes sense from a gameplay perspective.

It causes issues with the story, though. It’s hard enough telling a story through a video game but this just ramps up the difficulty. And the writing falters.

The setup for the split mission is this:

Tosh comes to you with a new job: an assault on Mengsk’s prison planet. There are many political prisoners there and releasing them would do wonders for the revolution.

But before you begin, Nova – one of Mengsk’s psionic assassins – contacts you. She says that Tosh has been lying this whole time. The minerals from Redstone and the terrazine can be used to train more Spectres like Tosh. Freeing his men would give Tosh an army of dangerous warriors.

The problem, Nova says, is that the training program makes you insane. Every Spectre becomes a psychopath and goes on a killing spree eventually.

Tosh doesn’t deny this. His counterargument is, why listen to Nova? She works for your enemy.

So you have a moral dilemma. Do you side with an insane killer just because he’s helped you? Or do you work with a noble enemy to stop a bigger threat?

There’s no way that Raynor would choose Tosh here. He’s spent the entire time mistrusting Tosh, yelling at Tosh, demanding answers from Tosh and scowling at Tosh. Now he’s learned his instincts were right and Tosh is a monster. You the player might not care – it’s war, after all, so no one is innocent – but Raynor sure would. Same with Horner. Even Tychus doesn’t like, respect or trust Tosh.

You’re given the choice anyway.

Whatever choice you make is the right one. If you side with Nova, you wipe out a dangerous group of lunatics. If you side with Tosh, he promises to use milder training techniques and Dr Hanson tells you that Nova lied, the training program is fine and doesn’t cause psychopathy at all.

And I guess that part where Tosh’s men killed innocent civilians didn’t really happen. Maybe the media lied about that – they’re not reliable journalists, after all. It’s weird to dangle that thread and then back away from it without explanation though.

You can’t make an informed choice here. The story lies to you, warping facts to fit your decision. Choosing between a hero and antihero could be interesting drama, but that’s not what this is. It’s either a choice between a loyal ally and a scheming enemy, or between a righteous enemy and a dangerous villain – but you don’t know which it is until you make the choice.

Whatever. I’m just glad they don’t use split missions in the other campaigns. This is a narrative mess, like if Sherlock Holmes tried to figure out who murdered Schrodinger’s Cat.

Both versions of this mission are No-Build / Search and Destroy missions. You unlock the Ghost or Spectre based on your choice. Both units are like scifi superspies – stealthy, deadly infiltrators with psionic powers and combat training.

The ludonarrative bug here is that psionic humans are... well, not rare exactly. But it’s like if you had a squad of elite soldiers, experts in sniper rifles, hacking, sneaking around and assassination, but you could only recruit people who are left-handed. Just how many of these soldiers could you put into action? But in gameplay you can train Ghosts by the hundreds, if you’re rich enough.

Training Spectres makes more sense, since Tosh can use the resources you gathered to unlock latent psionic powers. This means you can train from a wider pool of recruits.  That and you’ve freed the other Spectres from prison, so you’re bolstering your forces that way. There’s no such explanation if you get the Ghost. You get some schematics for their gear and training protocols, and that’s it.

That adds new problems to the lore – what does it mean when you can give anyone psionic powers? Why doesn’t Raynor sign up? Telepathy, telekinesis, enhanced abilities – that sounds useful for a rebel leader.

Mission: Ghost of a Chance

If you side with Nova, you have to destroy three targets: Tosh’s mineral cache, his terrazine cache and his psionic indoctrinator – a device that brainwashes you into being a psionic assassin.

This always bugged me. Can’t we steal back the resources? It was hard work getting those – do we really have to destroy them? This sort of feels like the first two missions were a waste of time, leaving us with little to show from them. Stealing these resources would at least mean they were a great payday.

You wipe out Tosh’s infrastructure, kill his Spectres and then Nova kills Tosh in a cutscene. I guess the galaxy is a safer place now, but it was safer before Tosh used you to get what he needed.

Mission: Breakout

If you side with Tosh, then you assault the prison. You control Tosh while Raynor sends trickles of forces against the enemy. It’s fun to sneak around, using a psionic assassin to cause misery for an enormous and powerful enemy base.

AI-Raynor is frustrating though. Even a novice player is leagues better than this idiot, sending trickles of ill-equipped soldiers into enemy fortifications. AI allies in the story tend to be liabilities – at least until Legacy of the Void.

Weird thing: as you command Tosh through the prison’s base, Raynor and Horner chime in every now and then to talk about what’s going on. Where’s Tychus, though? He doesn’t say a word. Yeah, Tychus doesn’t like or trust Tosh, but he’s a hardened convict and you’re cracking open the sector’s biggest prison. Has he really got no opinion on what’s going on?

You win, then Raynor and Tosh have a “we’ll never agree but we can respect each other” conversation. Then Tosh makes it clear that all future Spectres are volunteers and he’d never use a psionic indoctrinator, and it’s weird you even suggested that he would.

Ugh. This split mission might make it fun to replay the games, but it makes the story painful. Replaying the story doesn’t let you explore idealism versus pragmatism – it’s all idealism, even when you side with a serial killer / assassin / terrorist.

And the next split mission is even worst at this. Stay tuned for that.