14 DAY TRIAL // The Mass Effect franchise features a variety of aliens but, while there were some truly unique races, most of them were human-like, even if their appearance differed.
This was a conscious decision in order to make things easier and cheaper in terms of animation efforts, according to developer BioWare.
Mass Effect games focused on their main protagonist, Commander Shepard, who traveled around the galaxy and met all sorts of alien races.
While there was a big number of different types of aliens, many shared the same human-like features like walking on two legs and using two arms.
This was a decision on behalf of BioWare in order to save money, which would've been spent on creating new custom animations and other things.
"All party members needed to use a humanoid skeleton," BioWare's Dusty Everman told OXM. "If we'd ever tried to use a non-humanoid, the cost would have been huge. Instead, we took all the development effort that we could have put towards an odd squad mate and made a larger, more polished game."
According to Mass Effect franchise producer Casey Hudson, at the beginning there were clear lines drawn in order to make sure that the main alien races looked in a certain way, while other, secondary ones, were created to make the universe more exotic.
"We knew some races would figure prominently in the storyline," Hudson said. "So they had to function like the human characters, be able to carry a gun, etc. But we also wanted a sense of 'other aliens' around the periphery - species that may eventually play a major role but are really there to suggest that there's an exotic universe out there."
"For Mass Effect we developed a set of additional aliens, that would mainly be featured in the Citadel. Each developed a bit of a following, so over the series we found ways to make them play more important roles."
BioWare is currently working on another Mass Effect game that's completely separate from the main trilogy and won't feature Commander Shepard.