[Monolith]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:

quote:

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Originally posted by narf poit chez BOOM:
tsk, tsk. there's no reason for nasty races to look nasty.

There is no reason for them to look pleasant, or like anything else, for that matter. I want them to look mean and nasty. Nothing wrong with that.

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What looks mean and nasty probably depends a lot on what features scream "PREDATOR!" that we have evolved to recogize. True aliens might likely flip out at the site of say thick fur if the predators they evolved to recognize had it, so a furry cat-creature might appear wicked to them but appear cute or benign to us. All that being said, I think that many creatures will indeed have features we consider threatening, since common evolutionary pressures probably result in the same predator/prey recognitions on worlds similiar to ours. Truly "alien" lifeforms and environments would spawn other lifeforms with a range of different predator/prey traits, some we would recognize as threatening and some not. For the sake of SEIV, it's more fun if some aggressive races appear that way, and some don't; likewise for peaceful races.

In the end it's about what we desire to add flavor to the game in the style we want. A buddy of mine is hung up on the more "real" alien looks from Babylon 5. In the context of SEIV with the original races I wanted something a bit more non-human, but still somewhere in the neighborhood of the 1960's stylizations of the original races in SEIV so they wouldn't be SO jarring next to them.

Have I beat this issue to death yet