Helius Cluster Aliens - Designs

Mass Effect already has a quadraped, intelligent, even spacefaring species. One of them is in your avatar, in fact.

Yes such aliens would be better served as being intelligent in my opinion. At the very least, it would help distinguish the setting from the myriad of other science fiction universes that are stuffed to the brim with humans in rubber masks.  Plus, bringing in the more bizarre alien life would go a long way in helping to dehumanize the setting. Yes, the main narrative is human-centric, but would it kill the designers to not (seemingly) have the entire universe conform to our way of doing and perceiving things? A world were humanity is just a small, small part of a much larger, and more 'alien' setting?

That's what I loved about the novel Blindsight, it showcased perfectly how humanity is in fact not the standard by which the rest of the universe is measured. 

Khet might be something like this:

I really like this one. It still looks very alien but you could imagine it being intelligent instead of a generic monster and there's scope to tweak the features to differentiate between individual members of the same race. I'd love to see something like this in game.

You know what I would like to see, aside from the non humanoid designs? Aliens that don't conform to our sense of what beauty and/or ascetically pleasing shapes are and aren't assigned a morality on how "pretty" they look. It's rather trite and cliched when we have the blue fairy aliens as the good guys, but those roach aliens over there are automatically the bad guys.

I would love to see a reversal of that trope, just for the sake of it, in Andromeda. Ryder comes across a species of immaculate looking space elves, only to discover that they love to torture and eat their victims alive, while the amorphous fungoid aliens he/she passed earlier are an alien that is willing to help protect and assist the Milky Way refugees.

Not quite. Yes the revelation of the Asari government, and the willingness of the Rachni Queen to help; above any of the other species in the setting even; is indeed an inversion of that trope, but in all other instances the classic 'beauty = good' trope remains front and center, and in many ways undermines the initial reversal of the trope.

Consider how, if the player choses to leave the Rachni Queen to die in ME 3 (after rescuing her in ME 1), absolutely no one bats an eye about her death; heck Joker makes a joke/reference to the movie Aliens and how they should have just nuked the site from orbit. On the other hand, the whole Thessia mission is written with the intention of garnering sympathy for the Asari in general and Liaria specially with Shepard being railroaded into being sad about the fall of the planet and his/her failure to secure the beacon; the game even makes Shepard jump down Joker's throat when he makes an offhanded remark about the Asari government (even though the one made at the Rachni's expense is in arguably worse taste).  While killing the huskified children of the Queen all the squad mates will make statements about how much they hate bugs and things that resemble spiders, but when dealing with Banshees its all about the tragic loss of innocence for the Asari victims. Etc.

I could see a Mass Effect species like that...



Isn't this a concept art for the enemies in Star Trek Beyong?

ps: Am i the only one who thought the armors in Star Trek Beyond looked a bit "Mass Effect-ish"?



Have to disagree on that. The Racnhi were perceived as a threat because they did attack the salarian exploration team who made contact with them and reverse engineering their ship to acquire FTL technology. The they started to wage a centuries long war against the council races from that time. Only the Queen saved by Shepard wanted peace.

And the Asari altought they lied about having acess to unsanctioned prothean technology who gave their Republics a edge over the other galactical powers they indeed worked as mediators across the known galaxy trying to solve conflict which make them been seen as diplomats by others species.