The Story of Starcraft Part 23: Wings of Liberty: The Refugee Missions

Good guy and gentleman rebel Jim Raynor gets a distress call. Dr Hanson is the leader of a group of refugees, displaced by the Zerg invasion and abandoned by the Dominion.

This subplot establishes Raynor as a white knight hero and the Dominion as, at best, cold and calculating. These fringe worlds are too difficult or not important enough to defend, so they’re abandoned. That might be the right strategic call, but it still leaves millions of people without hope.

Raynor leads with his heart here, helping these refugee colonists reach safety. Then he helps them again. Then...

Well, things get interesting.

Not necessarily good, but interesting.

Mission: The Evacuation

This mission is an Escort quest.

Whoa, whoa, calm yourself. Yeah, I get it – escort missions in video games are among the greatest sins that humans could ever call entertaining. But this escort quest is done right.

The target you have to protect moves fast but not too fast, can take a bit of punishment and can even fight back a little. They move along a fixed path and push anything out of the way, so they never get stuck.

That’s all you need to make an escort quest reasonable - some hiking boots and a Kevlar vest.

You unlock the Firebat here. There’s not a lot to say about it that I haven’t already said. You’re probably playing this early on, so it’s nice to have a bulky, armoured infantry to play with.

Anyway, the plot:

Groups of refugees are trying to cross the map to reach the starport. Once there, they can flee the planet. They have good reason to want to – the Zerg are all over the place. You need to build up a force to protect each group of colonists from attacks.

Another way this is a decent escort quest – you can afford to make mistakes. Each group is an armoured vehicle with a roof-mounted gun. If it’s destroyed, ten colonists make their way on foot. These colonists are real squishy, so you’re punished for letting the vehicle fall but you’re not eliminated.

The objective is “save X colonists without letting Y of them die” where the exact numbers vary. I think. And I’m too lazy to doublecheck. Losing too many refugees to the Zerg means you’ll need to escort another wave to meet your quota, which raises interesting narrative questions. If you play perfectly, is that last wave just abandoned? Is there a lack of transport ships to go around, so it’s first come, first served? Or is the last wave in a state of quantum uncertainty, only existing if it needs to?

Dr Hanson’s lack of personality shines through here. She’s grateful to Raynor for rescuing them. She’s sad if any of the colonists die. There’s a moment of humanity where she talks about how out of her depth she is – she's a scientist, not a politician, but she has to lead them anyway.

The problem is there’s no chemistry between her and the other characters. Her conversations with Raynor are mostly “I’m rescuing your people” and “Yes, thank you, please do what you can to rescue my people”. The rest of her dialogue is her delivering science-related exposition, which Stetmann should do. Stetmann is more interesting than she is – more importantly, he sticks around for the entire campaign.

At the very least, shouldn’t Hanson and Stetmann interact? They could get into enthusiastic conversations where they’re both talking over each other. They could argue about theories and evidence. Hell, they could do anything other than have Hanson complain about how barbaric the lab is.

Ugh. The writing here is bad. Let’s move on.

Mission: Outbreak

Hanson asks for help. The colonists, along with refugees from countless other worlds, are chilling in a refugee camp. The Dominion continues their policy of leaving them to fend for themselves, so disease is rampant.

It’s no ordinary disease, though. It’s a Zerg virus that causes infestation, turning Terrans into shambling monsters.

This turns into a Cycles mission, shifting between Search and Destroy / Timed Defence segments. You have to burn the infestation out with fire and bullets – in other words, destroy all the enemy buildings. But there’s a twist. The infested are vulnerable to sunlight, so they only come out at night. This means the night phases are timed defence segments, where hundreds of we’re not calling them zombies but they’re zombies pour into your base. During the day, you go out and destroy as many infested structures as you can.

You unlock the Hellion here. It sounds like a good fit – it's a buggy with flamethrowers attached, making it good for fast scouting. Unfortunately, its damage is woefully low. It gets to the infested buildings quickly enough but takes ages to burn them down.

A big force of Marines with Medics will do better. Reapers are even better still.

That’s the gameplay. What about the story here?

Introduce not-zombies and the genre shifts to horror. It’s harder to create horror in a real-time strategy game compared to, say, anything first-person. You can still do jump scares, especially if Zerg suddenly unburrow – but that’s less scary and more frustrating.

Instead, this mission leans into body horror. The infested refugees are bulging, warped distortions of humanity. The first one you encounter begs you to kill him, so at least some of them are self-aware as they stagger towards their friends and try to kill them.

Seeing familiar structures with broken windows and tentacles bulging out of them is unnerving.

Starcraft isn’t horror at its core, but it dabbles in horror elements – especially around the Zerg. This mission continues this fine tradition and makes it even stronger. It won’t scare you, but it might make you feel deeply uncomfortable.

That’s a win for horror.

The Hanson Story

Raynor raises the possibility that some of the colonists might still be infected. Hanson throws a tantrum, saying that her people are fine and how dare he suggest otherwise.

Hanson… aren’t you a doctor? Your people were exposed to a bioweapon. Them falling sick isn’t a judgement on their character - it’s a real possibility you need to ward against.

Raynor also suggests she look into a cure for the infestation virus. Hanson says finding a cure is supposed to be impossible but, yeah, actually, that’s a great idea.

Hanson… aren’t you a doctor? Why did it take a grizzled soldier to suggest doing your job?

Now, an aside: I’ve generally liked the writing in Wings of Liberty but now I’m hating on Ariel Hanson. Is that my misogyny shining through? Am I mad that she’s a woman? Nah. Kerrigan is a well-written woman here, with almost every line sending chills through you - although a lot of that is the brilliant voice acting. Mira Han, who we haven’t talked about yet, it wacky and fun. Kate Lockwell, the reporter, is the most grounded and relatable character in the game.

This is Part 23 of my analysis of the plot of Starcraft. I’m over 32,000 words into this series. I hope it’s obvious that I care about good writing - and Hanson doesn’t have any.

Back to the bad writing…

Hanson says she’s found a world for the colonists to settle - the uninhabited but fertile world of Haven, near the edge of Protoss space. Raynor warns her that if any of her people are infected, the Protoss will burn her world and everyone on it.

She says it’ll be fine.

You’ll never guess what happens next. A large Protoss fleet led by Executor Selendis (oh! Another interesting and well-written woman in this game!) shows up. She greets Raynor with respect, thanking him for everything he’s done for her people, but she’s detected Zerg on Haven and she’s here to cleanse the planet with fire.

Hanson throws a tantrum, half-demanding and half-begging him to save her people from the consequences of her poor decisions. She says she knows she can find a cure for the Zerg virus if she just had a bit more time.

If you side with her, it’s because you believe she’s too arrogant to listen to your advice, too dumb to think of pursuing a cure on her own, but is somehow smart enough to find a cure using scraps found in your war-torn laboratory.

We’re talking about the Zerg here. Biology is what they do. I’d be surprised if a combined Protoss/Dominion taskforce with plenty of funding could inoculate against this virus, and she’s talking about curing it?

No. I can buy magic space crystals, psychic powers and the need to gather raw materials on the front line, but this is a stretch.

But - like the Tosh split mission - whoever you side with is the right choice.

Mission: Safe Haven

If you decide to fight the Protoss fleet on the vague promise that Hanson can probably cure this incurable virus, then… it works! The colonists are instantly and perfectly healthy. But the Protoss can’t sense this for some reason, so they want to sterilise the planet anyway.

It’s an awful setup, but there’s one nice payoff:

Selendis admires Raynor. She admires him so much that she’s looking forward to facing him in battle. She’s not a monster - she’s a proud warrior with a sacred duty to protect her people from all threats. You get the sense she’d rather fight alongside Raynor, but this is the next best thing.

It’s a nice way to characterise both her as a person and the Protoss as a whole.

Both versions of the Haven mission are Search and Destroy missions with strong Map Control elements. You unlock the Viking - a combat vehicle with two modes. It fighter mode, it can fly and attack air units; in assault mode, it’s a ground unit that can only attack other ground units.

In this mission, there are three Protoss bases you need to sabotage while protecting colonist villages from Protoss air attacks. The Viking can move fast, dominate the skies and then land in cheeky places to cause havoc in enemy bases. It’s a great fit for the mission.

Then you get to fight a Protoss Mothership - a deadly, flexible platform of death and destruction. It slowly moves from village to village, blasting them with energy weapons so powerful that they crack the ground apart.

This should be an epic boss fight. That’s what the story suggests.

Instead, the gameplay lets us down. The Vikings are fast and outrange the Mothership. The Mothership is slow and moves on a predictable path. You’d have to screw up badly to take even a single shot from this ultimate weapon of planetary destruction.

Yikes.

Then Selendis withdraws, talking about how the legends about you are true or something.

Then Hanson thanks you for saving her people and leaves you there. It’s sappy and unearned, but I guess it matches the tone of most of the campaign.

Mission: Haven’s Fall

Assuming you take the reasonable choice here, Raynor tells Selendis to back off. This is a Terran matter, he says, so he’ll deal with this.

Is he making a stupid decision based on honour? Wouldn’t the tactically sound decision be to let the Protoss handle this - or, at least, have their help with it? No. Well, maybe that’s the tactically sound approach, but the Protoss want to wipe out all the colonists. Raynor will be a bit more selective, burning out infested homes rather than incinerating the entire planet.

This approach will save a lot of innocent lives here. Plus it makes the Protoss like you even more.

Like I said above, this is a Search and Destroy / Map Control mission. There are villages scattered around the map. Some of them are already infested and will send a steady trickle of not-zombies your way.

Periodically, the Zerg will send a force to an uninfested village - a mix of both air and ground units. They’ll spend some time infesting it, which is a process you can interrupt if you’re fast and deadly enough.

Vikings aren’t the only answer here, but a healthy force of them that you patch up between engagements will make this fairly simple.

Alternatively, you can use Ghosts/Spectres here if you’ve unlocked them. I’ve done that in the past - the clumped up enemies fall well to the nukes those units can call down, plus it’s funny to hear colonists thank you for saving their village as a radioactive crater slowly cools in the middle of it.

Especially because saved villages can be reinfested, so you can nuke the same huts and trailers over and over.

You win when there are no more infested villages on the map. That’s when Horner says there’s been an incident in the lab. Hanson locked herself inside in a desperate attempt to find a cure. She failed, because of course she did - the only cure for infestation is fire. She’s become infested, but not like the other shambling not-zombies you encounter. No, Hanson has become a creature that’s faster and smarter than they are.

This suggests - subtly, mind you - that she wasn’t just infested like the others. Something probably went wrong with her research. She grew desperate and careless, accidentally becoming the victim of the thing she was trying to overcome.

It’s a dark ending to a dark storyline. It wasn’t pointless - you saved countless innocent people. Those people didn’t die to the Zerg and the infestation didn’t spread to the core worlds. This was the best possible outcome, unless you believe in magical cures pulled out of orifices.

Either way, Hanson is off your ship and you don’t have to deal with her anymore. Just like that, the writing improves.