All alien races they know about are humanoids. How do you make them different than humans?asked by Sabah
TL;DRThe writers make alien species distinct through their history, culture and especially their senses and physiology, which shape how each species sees the world and acts, even though they currently share a general body shape.
Well, I think that's a speciesist term, first of all. I don't think we should be calling them humanoid.
Yeah, bipedal or die.
Yeah, I don't know. It's always that thing of the... For me, it's that sort of weird balance of trying to... We are making a game, so there's that sort of, the humans of Star Citizen, of the UEE and stuff like that, how do the Xi'an react with them and stuff like that. So you want to build those sorts of conflicts and, oh, humans believe this, so the Xi'an might believe that, if we want to make a little bit of head-butting there. But yeah, I don't know. For me, there's also that aspect of trying to come up with unique ways that they could have developed. Writing out, actually, we did a time capsule thing for the Xi'an, so writing out their history, big events that happened throughout their history, and that actually really helped establish that mindset of how they would approach something as a completely distinct culture.
Yeah, I think a lot of it, too, for me is when we start talking about them, even though their physiology may be, right now, two arms and two legs and a torso and a general shape like that, I think a lot of the stuff that we can play with is in their senses and how they experience the world. And that gives them a really different perspective on stuff from us. We really like the idea that the Banu are quite a hardy species and they can survive temperatures well in excess of what we can on both sides of the range, and different atmospheres and stuff like that. And so them being a little more, maybe less cautious and blundering and going forward comes as a side effect of that, being hardier. And the Xi'an have a very long life and they have duller senses, and so this more cautious approach all feeds into that. And so we try to think about how are they seeing the world and how is that different than humans as we go. So I think that helps me a lot as a writer when I'm trying to think about, all right, what is the Xi'an way of looking at this? What is the Banu way of looking at this?