How 'alien' is Mass Effect Andromeda going to be?

I was just saying that aliens can look a lot more alien while still following those criteria, not that the aliens we have don't look alien. 
As for the Asari, they look like what we see them as. That bachelor party scene wasn't meant to be taken seriously, and we can tell what they really loook like because of things like photos which wouldn't be able to change and yet they look exactly how we know them as. 

I agree....I think the Khet are already being tagged as one of our major villains in the game and it's true that this series have kept it very star-trekish with it's theme, albeit a bit darker with it's earlier concept of the reapers. For this game I don't see EPIC major universal ending alien apocalypse. I'm getting an action packed sci-fi space themed journey.

And as other have mentioned, any aliens that are not on the order of having a similar human build looks to be regulated towards a wild beast or animal. 

There is a little bit of give with Humanity. They do gene mod, there is a slowww transhumanist progression, Shepard is arguably made a bit 'prothean', etc.

But its been overall really damn minor in practice. Its still been humanhumanpreserverhumanshumanshumans.

Well if the aliens we already have look alien, how can Andromedan races look more alien to you?  What would accomplish that, in your opinion?  

Guardians of The Galaxy alien. So, not very alien and more colorful, vibrant, familiar and human and emotional... and cheesy.

Honestly it remains to be seen. Nobody can tell how alien the Kett are just from their designs. I just hope the new aliens end up feeling like they really do belong to this franchise.

Eh, to be honest Hanar and Elcor (and Volus) were pretty silly from the very first moment we meet them in ME1. A volus who moans about human privilege in a very silly way, elcor who has love problems with the Consort and another one who plays verbal ping-pong with the aforementioned volus (while sounding a bit like HK-47) and religious fanatic hanar who also doesn't come across as overly serious. 

I never saw any of those aliens as intentional "joke races" in the first game; certainly not to the meme/caricature status they were reduced to in subsequent titles.


I didn't find the Volus ambassador's complaint on the Presidium to be all that funny to be honest. He was rude and sarcastic with Shepard, but nothing about his dialogue came across as intentionally comedic. Really, I felt he had a legitimate gripe considering how both his species and the Elcor had been a part of the Council races for over a hundred years and that they had only recently been granted embassy status, and then, to top it all off, both the Volus and Elcor ambassador had to share a space. Meanwhile, our human ambassador gets an entire office to himself, granted after only around thirty years of membership, and Udina is still whining and complaining over the fact that he doesn't have more authority and/or that humanity hasn't been made an inner Council species or given Spectre status. I can find the Volus' snarkiness to be understandable in that light.

As for the Elcor, the lore specifically states that they talk in that fashion for other species' benefit, to help avoid confusion. It was an interesting take on their species; one that had a range of body language and expression that: "made a human's smile seem as subtle as a fireworks display". They had a lot more depth than what they initially came across as, but the writers apparently fell into the same assumption that most players did in later titles, namely the one that believes they are dim-witted and only good for a comedic foil because they "Talk Funny".

And the Hanar were very interesting as a species before their poster child became Blasto: The Meme Factory. The whole dynamic with their face and soul names offered insight into a species with a deeply rooted duality to their everyday lives. Also add in their penchant for extreme politeness, even against those they hate, and the species becomes a lot more nuanced than the whole "big stupid jellyfish" stick they were branded with going forward. Plus, the religious zealot on the Presidium wasn't that comedic, that particular Hanar was just stating a fact about it's own species; namely that they were uplifted by the Enkindlers aka Protheans. If the game is going to jump on the Hanar's case and assign "big stupid jellyfish" to them because of a religious connotation to the Protheans, then I propose that we should start calling the Asari "scaly dumb bimbos" every time one of them says "By the Goddess" since their whole species was uplifted by the Protheans as well. After all, the Hanar were honest and upfront about their Prothean influence.

If it helps you could try imagining having sex with the alien from The Thing.

Personally, the look, aesthetic design, appearance etc. of any and all new alien races only goes so far for me.

It can look cool, and distinctly alien to what we've come to expect or seen before, but if, like Vortex13 has iterated before here, its just a mindless killing machine, an enemy or boss for us to shoot at, then the design of the alien is only one half of the glass filled, the other completely neglected, that of what it is the alien sees, thinks, feels. Whether they are sapient and have a different or wholly unique intelligence, one human minds are incapable of understanding. Something completely far and beyond anything we've come to see, or expect. If that can be offered, then I wouldn't mind if the design leans more towards the humanoid aliens we've seen in the past, as a new alien species that's sapience and intelligence and culture is so advanced or different, or beyond human understanding, then that seems infinitely more interesting and engaging to me, than a funky looking alien grizzly bear we shoot at.

This discussion actually reminds me of a conversation Shepard and EDI have in Mass Effect 3

She and Liara are basically calculating whether the mass effect phenomenon occurs only in our universe, or all possible universes. She is quoted as saying "It may be that our laws of physics only occur in a finite area - a bubble, if you will, in an ocean of other possibilities... you could reach a place where one plus one equals three. Everything would change. All energy, all matter, all the underlying math of the universe would be unrecognizable to us"

I found this brief, easy to miss conversation really interesting, and a sign that arguably at least some thought has gone into such a scenario, which should not be limited to other universes, but other galaxies as well. The idea that, we could encounter an alien species, that perceives the universe differently to us similar to how EDI described. A complete clash of understandings of the universe like this could be really interesting, and a much more different way us humans in the game could interact with a new alien species.

Thanks Vortex13 for prompting such an interesting and engaging discussion on this topic. I am also really interested and hopeful Andromeda may offer us such scenarios that have been mentioned.

I'm not expecting anything more alien than what we got in the Milky Way. Hopefully we get some nice interactions with creatures similar to the thorian and Rachni queen. I can't imagine we get a lot of it, but who knows.

Succinctly put. Something being 'alien' means more than just a crazy appearance; it's a profound difference from what we can relate to and understand. The best example of this type of depiction I have seen in recent memory has to be the Scramblers from the novel Blindsight:


Now I can understand the limitations of animation and why the humanoid shape is so prominent, but I do have to draw the line with the writing department apparently having everything in the universe being instantly relatable and understandable on a human level. I'm not necessarily asking for the game to provide a 500 page dissertation on how this one particular alien species perceives the universe in comparison to us (although that would be amazing), just that some effort be put into said race that is not summed up as being a human in a rubber suit or a mindless monster that we must kill for…. XP/loot. The Rachni, the Thorian, the (ME 1) Hanar & Elcor, and the (ME 2) Geth weren't beyond human understanding, but they were different enough to warrant that 'alien' descriptor. You could interact with those species and see that they didn't have a direct 1:1 comparison with humanity like the other aliens did and it forced the player to confront a line of thinking that wasn't exactly like their own. 

It's funny, because BioWare likes to do this sort of thing all the time when introducing LGTB and other minority viewpoints. We get numerous dialogue options about exploring who these people are, and how they perceive the world around them, but asking for the same thing with an alien species that can see "songs the color of oily shadow" is too much apparently, and they are regulated to a 2 minute cameo in a 100+ hour game at best. 




At the very least, if the writers are indeed going to ditch the concept of an alien intelligence altogether, can BioWare give me a playable non-humnoid alien to run around with in the multiplayer part of the game? At least there I can sorta see the universe through the eyes of a Rachni Brood Warrior, even if all that entails is killing waves of incoming hostiles.