Helius Cluster Aliens - Designs

I'm hoping the enemy race (the Khet?) are very alien-like but more interesting and compelling than a typical "monster race". For example, take orcs from LOTR or the Collectors from ME2 - you don't really get a sense of individuality or motivation from the enemy, it's just a generic mob of "bad looking" creatures or aliens.

What I'd really like is something that looks distinctively alien (i.e: not along the lines of asari or twi'lek - essentially humans with multicoloured skin or added features). I'd like be able to look at it and be like "yup, that's not from around here!" but at the same time have differences and distinctions between each individual member of the species so they don't all look the same. Think of it as if Turians were an antagonistic race in the original trilogy - you could come into conflict between say Lorik and Pallin and Nihlus and be able to tell them all apart - all their own individuals with own personalities and motivations etc. (Realise that's more than just physical design appearance, but it's worth mentioning too I think.)

I don't have any ideas on the specifics - mostly I just want to be surprised and get that same sense of wonder I did when playing ME1 for the first time and discovering all these different types of alien. For that reason I hope they don't reveal too much about the Helius aliens in the marketing leading up to the game!

I actually think BioWare themselves have said this. 

"Also expect a vast number of planets to explore, each of which will have one particular biome, according to BioWare. But these areas will be huge, and traversable both on foot and via the returning Mako buggy."

Eurogamer article


I don't know whether every planet will be like this (I hope not) or there will be a mixture of diverse worlds and single biomes. I liked some of the variety of the exploration planets in ME1, so I wouldn't mind if it was something along those lines, albeit with more going on and less empty spaces. As long as there is enough large, diverse "hub" planets as well. 

I only hope that means they allow us to explore one biome, not that the planet is literally just one planet-sized biome, because that's impossible. The conditions for life physically cannot be uniform across a planet when a planet's shape prevents it from receiving equal amounts of light from all angles. That's the entire reason why polar caps exist.

If they truly do this, they've gone absolutely, full, 100% undiluted pure retard. Single-biome planets belong in space fantasy, not sci-fi.

See, this is exactly the kind of interesting thinking BioWare used to have when making ME1. They should go back to it, not away from it.

I think the Khet are going to be Mass Effect Kzinti's.

I wouldn't worry too much about the single biome thing, unless we actually hit multiple points around the planet in regions that should be vastly different from one another. Likely it'll just be that one location, which is pretty much the same as every other ME game.

I'm not a praying man, but...

We should probably send them all the ideas we came up with for the ReGenesis/Reimagined project.

Which still isn't dead, by the way, just dormant.

I would like to see some non-bipedal alien, similar to The Mimics from Edge of Tomorrow movie.

Woah, it's trippy watching the Mimics move. Now that'd be an alien worth fighting.

Bipedalism is an important trait for the development of intelligence, particularly tool use, because it frees up the hands.