Mass Effect aliens aren't alien
The aliens in Mass Effect are more human-like than actual aliens would be. Mass effect has just enough biology to have me interested and just enough biology to infuriate me because i can see all the flaws. Part of it is that mass effect tries to play on classic scifi tropes which themselves were based on bad science. Like aliens in old movies were humans in suits with paint. The second part is that the game was written by a bunch of writers not scientists so a bunch if small inaccuracies are everywhere and i can tell while they did research it's only a basic understanding. Biology serves as a narrative tool and thus lacks the fundamental rules real life science exists on.
Intelligent design, gods' will, creationism, etc. don't exist in reality. Evolution is the process in which random new mutations arise in a population and traits which best allow the population to survive and reproduce in their specific environmental conditions, are differentially selected for over many generations becoming more or less common. So Padok Wilks as a trained biologist should know this. The thing about mass effect is that it includes many common scifi tropes and many scifi tropes in the anglosphere by nature of the history of the anglosphere, include a lot of latent christianity, including intelligent design. On of the common scifi tropes is of the ancient aliens, precursors, creators sometimes. Take for example 2001: A Space Odyssey guiding humans with the monoliths and transcending them into space babies. In Evangelion the game reveals the First Ancestral Race. In mass effect we know certain species like the proteans have meddled with other pre-space species. We know the reapers have been setting up conditions to guide species to harvest. Even if the process of evolution is the same as in the real universe, it's well established in scifi that another ancient species could have meddled with the course of a species development.
What is intelligence. Humans by default are pretty anthropocentric, it is difficult for most to imagine things beyond their own experiences. And so especially historically but even now intelligence has been defined as how close to human an animal acted. The debunked evolutionary ladder concept includes both the concepts above: humanity placed as the pinnacle of evolution and it's goal, a tiered hierarchy where of course humans were at the top and where other animals were ranked as more or less advanced based on how similar to humans they were. Dolphins use tools and toys, slime molds can solve mazes, masting trees or bamboo know exactly when to coordinate reproductive events years apart, octopuses solving puzzles, squirrels and other cache making species like certain birds remember thousands of individual locations more than most humans can. Yet still we see these things in human concepts: tools, memory, problem solving, the classic mirror exercise. In mass effect all the aliens are humanoid (minus the evil reapers (and their creators). The sapient species are pretty much all bipedal bilaterally symmetrical tetrapods with a recognizable head, 2 feet, and 2 hands. It is also the species that most resemble humans that get the most screen time, speaking lines, and other narrative measures of importance. The only non human shaped species are elcor which are quadrupedal and hanar which are mostly a joke. The leviathans and reapers and rachni are my lifeline, and they have non human body plans to make them sinister, villainous, untrustworthy, and well alien. None of them are really characters, they are more exposition and plot points, obstacles for the player to overcome. Where are my mycelium aliens! where are my incomprehensible aliens. like imagine because of the communication gap all the species you don't even know are sapient (what is sapient).
The aliens in Mass Effect are tame. They're made to be palatable to the average person's sexual orientation. Drell were literally designed around Thane who was created to be attractive in an exotic way. This has many causes including the antropocentricism touched upon above. Mass Effect includes a lot of scifi tropes and many of these tropes were from visual media like movies or TV. The thing with video is that the cheapest and easiest way to get an alien character is to paint an actor blue and maybe glue some prostetic antennae on their head. Actually hiring a biologist consultant to design a species, dedicated writers to making it work, prop and puppet builders, puppet actors, artists, special effects teams, is all extremely expensive in effort, money, and time. so no one ever does it. and once people painted green was a short hand for alien other studios feel less shy on using lazy short hand for aliens. Lastly writers are pretty much never scientists, a lot of them are english lit majors. Writing biologically plausible aliens is way out of their field. And I can tell the Bioware writers did try, but just like a bunch of english majors trying to write biology, they lack an understanding of the fundamental principles underpinning biology and science in general. So while it's a good effort, the believability is a veneer and it easily falls away.
From a design perspective sure I can understand the tropes Mass Effect is invoking, but why bother having aliens if they aren't going to be alien. Now Bioware could have leaned into the guided evolution aspect, that reapers have been farming species into convergently evolving humanoid shapes for millions of years. But that isn't a major point in Mass Effect and also the Leviathans aren't humanoid so why would they. A classic scifi trope they also could have invoked would be the precursor/ancestral race trope where all the sapients are descended from a common humanoid species seeded onto different planets. This is tricky to navigate though as it can be very easy to slide into race purity talking points.
And another thing it's totally implausible that most species communicate with what humans would recognize as vocals. The exceptions are elcor scent and hanar light communication, almost everyone else speaks and that's bizarre. Would turians really have vaguely Roman sounding names? Why would any species just so happen to have anatomy that can make similar sounds to humans. I can excuse a lot of it as black box translator technology but my suspension of disbelief is broken that the translator is making up names that fit human naming sensibilities.
