They’re all males in the game. We usually try to avoid the females because what do you do with a female Turian? Do you give her breasts? What do you do? Do you put lipstick on her?
Mass Effect 3′s art director, Derek Watts (via gaarrus)
No but seriously, what do you do? You honestly could not give a turian any female body features. It wouldn’t be remotely noticeable. catcomixzstudios opinions? (via coleplots10) /// To start, I don’t know for sure if the quote is real or not, or if there is some other context to it. If it is, I’m both kind of surprised and disappointed. Now, I’m an artist and a Mass Effect fan, so I would have loved to have been posed this question before they began development. One thing you have to consider first and foremost is that alien biology doesn’t have to follow the same strict male-gets-female-pregnant ruleset that humans have. Even on Earth, that isn’t always the case. But, I suppose they didn’t want to get too complicated with it, so that’s fine. Assuming we’re going with the male/female dynamic, whether the males and females would differ greatly or almost not at all is something to consider. Just look at your own pets. Besides their reproductive parts, if you put a couple of dogs side by side, I’ll bet you probably wouldn’t be able to tell what sex they are. And yet, there are also species where the males and females look drastically different. The male angler fish is a tiny little thing compared to the females, and basically only exists as a tiny sperm factory. The point here is that there are options, and the path their evolution takes will determine how Turians (or any species for that matter) will look. Now, it’s pretty that Turians are part of the “humanoid” category of aliens, so they will likely rely on similar things to be able to pick out males and females. Generally, male humans are larger, have facial hair, and are more aggressive. Likewise, human females are usually smaller, lack substantial facial hair, and are often more polite. (Obvious generalities are obvious.) We use and have internalized these kinds of traits as a marker for the sexes, though they can still be inaccurate. Women can be bigger and stronger than men, it just isn’t as common, so we aren’t as used to it. To be fair, if we still all walked around butt-naked, this kind of confusion might be minimized, but there aren’t really any societies (or in Mass Effect’s case, few species) where that’s considered ok. SO, that being said, with Turians being humanoid, some of our traditional markers still apply. Unfortunately, there are very few references to go by, but we do have one major one.
Nyreen Kandros. When compared to
our good buddy Garrus, there are very few notable physical differences. Their armor covers most of them, but the internet will kindly take care of that for us.
As I said, they likely don’t go running around naked, but if they were just wearing t-shirts and jeans, we’d still be able to tell some of these differences. Males are generally larger, they have more plating, and seem to have very square hips (females seem to have softer shaping to their hips). Also apparently if you’re a really frickin’ dumb male Turian who really has trouble with this sort of thing, females literally have glowy shit on their midriffs so look for the light fellas. Now I’m gonna tackle how they handled this from a more artistic perspective. Obviously, they’re going to want to make designs so that players can tell individual members of a race apart. Humans tend to focus most of the face, so that was a good place to start. It just so happens that face-paint is a Turian thing, so an important character running around with a bright red face isn’t a problem. But, since like every Turian you encounter is wearing some elaborate shit that makes it hard to gauge physical differences, it seems the face was the main point they focused on. Of course, you can obviously use their armor or whatever they’re wearing as a method of telling them apart as well. Humans may have internalized certain traits as being feminine or masculine, but it wouldn’t be that hard to explain in-game that a certain marking, body shape, head shape, number of this-or-that, etc is a way of telling the difference between males and females. I actually did create some of my own alien species, as it happens. I found it shockingly easy to make easily identifiable traits so one can tell the difference between males and females with relative ease. For example, I created one species called the Averint, who all have wings and are able to fly. However, there’s a huge difference between male and female members of the species; the females have wings on their backs (think like angel wings with bird feathers) and the males have wing-arms. And the thing is, you can pretty much justify anything like this WITH SCIENCE (specifically evolution through natural selection). The females having their wings separate allowed them to hold and carry their young while flying, so they were more successful at survival. The males wing-arms became a benefit for hunting. (made-up) SCIENCE. Of course, when designing characters in the first place, even background characters, you should make the effort to give them distinctive forms. With almost any species, no two individuals are going to look exactly the same. Even if they look much alike, there will also be tiny little fractions of differences. A slightly bigger head, more shapely waist, longer neck, thicker fingers, etc. Don’t worry, though; I’m not expecting game designers to develop 4 million totally different models just as background decoration. But even small (but noticeable) changes could be pretty much all you need. In Mass Effect, you didn’t always see female members of alot of species (except mostly until 3). My quick glance at the Wiki (at least for Turians) didn’t specify much of why there wouldn’t be many females around. As far as I can tell, they’re treated with about the same level of respect as males. They serve in the military without question (Garrus himself had an “encounter” with one of these ladies). I’m willing to wager that they just didn’t think too much about it in the previous games. Plus making the models would have been extra work. Whatever. Kind of sad, but whatever. In 3, you can encounter 2 Turian females (Nyreen and some Turian lady who Garrus can bang if you’re not banging him). Nyreen’s cool, but the lack of Turian ladies for seemingly no reason (in universe, anyway) is one aspect that does still bother me. Their design, for the few times they’re involved, however, is serviceable to me. Well that was an hour of me straight-up nerding out over Mass Effect and art. If anyone actually bothers to read through all this, bless your heart. And respond if you have anything you’d want to add or correct. I did this mostly off the top of my head will little lead-up.
(via catcomixzstudios)
Holy crap man, I forgot to think that way *publishes post as a novel*