Why No Female Aliens in Mass Effect?

[JamesWebber]

I wanna see a female krogan but noooooo, you give me shit

There will be that Krogan "princes" In ME3 and since we are visiting the other species homeworlds there is a huge possibility that we are going to see more females

 

[Casual Shinji]

The same reason why there's no fat humans in Mass Effect: It's easier to work off of one template than to waste all your developement resources on designing a wide variety of models.

 

[Lokithrsourcerer]

there were quite a lot of females from what i saw or at least characters i perceived to be female. wasn't there a female salarian council member in the first game? plenty of quarians (Tali is a legend)

 

[Wanderer787]

Batarian females, do you REALLY want to see them?

Thank you for that. Now I'm going to go poke out my mind's eye.

 

[standokan]

Because it´s easier that way and they have the perfect excuse `Why would every alien have a sex?´

 

[Jacco]

snip

I wonder what they are going to sound like. I always thought Garrus' voice was cool sounding so I'm kind of interested to know what a female voice will sound like with that duality to it.

 

[Char-Nobyl]

Yes yes, ASIDE from the Asari.

EDIT: And Quarians, sorry.

Yep. Moving on.

It's been kind of a running joke for me and my boyfriend that all the races in Mass Effect must have 1950's-esque culture, because apparently all the females of their race stay at home. aside from Asari and Humans, you have yet to see a female of any other race, even minor races like Volus, Elcor or Hanar, not to mention Turians, Salarians etc. I know some of them have cultural excuses, (Krogan women are precious etc,) but ones like the Turians are particularly egregious when it comes to this; Garrus mentions that Turian women serve in the Military, so why have you NEVER run across one?

Well, to start off, your question answers itself: Garrus said that turian women serve in the Hierarchy military. Now, riddle me this: when did we ever actually see squads or even members of the Hierarchy military?

But in a broader sense, look at the turians as a race. They're avian. We're simian. For all we know, we have run across turian females. The issue would be that we wouldn't know how to tell them apart from turian males. Again, they're avian, so it's unlikely that they'll be sporting breasts.

Same thing goes for salarians, in all honesty. Hell, we know for a fact that they reproduce by laying eggs. And we did run across a krogan female. It was during Mordin's loyalty quest. There was a dead krogan on a lab table, and Mordin explained that it was a female hoping that experimentation could lead to a genophage cure. And as if the ME universe was trying to stress my point, that corpse? Pretty much indistinguishable from any other krogan you see. They're reptiles, after all.

In all honesty, the same goes for the other races, too. Elcor don't normally communicate through speech, and we don't know how they reproduce, so half the elcor we've met could've been female. And the hanar...really? Just...really?

I understand that in ME3 you're supposed to see more females of the species, but my question is, why has it taken so long? It doesn't seem terribly difficult to design a few female Aliens, and they seem to have plentiful female voice actors, so why have they neglected to use female Aliens up to this point?

I guess most of what I've written above already answers those questions. By any large, you can just look at the asari and quarians, and ask yourself how we know they're female. Now apply those standards of gender-assessment to other races, and ask whether or not they make biological sense.

 

[Mrsoupcup]

I think ME3 will address this, though the treason they haven't done it yet is due to memory issues. Making character models is already tricky, now imagine a model for like 15 different races AND their opposite genders.

Hell there are races we haven't even seen yet, like the virtual aliens and a race of bird people.

Smart money says ME3 will have 3 disks.

 

[stormcrow5]

There are females in the diffrent races, just because they dont have tits do not make them any less female. Female hanar maybe have shorter tentacles or something.

 

[Mrsoupcup]

Yes yes, ASIDE from the Asari.

EDIT: And Quarians, sorry.

It's been kind of a running joke for me and my boyfriend that all the races in Mass Effect must have 1950's-esque culture, because apparently all the females of their race stay at home. aside from Asari and Humans, you have yet to see a female of any other race, even minor races like Volus, Elcor or Hanar, not to mention Turians, Salarians etc. I know some of them have cultural excuses, (Krogan women are precious etc,) but ones like the Turians are particularly egregious when it comes to this; Garrus mentions that Turian women serve in the Military, so why have you NEVER run across one?

I understand that in ME3 you're supposed to see more females of the species, but my question is, why has it taken so long? It doesn't seem terribly difficult to design a few female Aliens, and they seem to have plentiful female voice actors, so why have they neglected to use female Aliens up to this point?

There is actually a female Krogan in one trailer for ME3, and I believe in game informer they said there is going to be a female Batarian as a major character.

Hanar an Asari are Mono-gendered, and female Volus and Elcor rarely leave their Homeworld or Colonies.

So in ME3 you can expect to see female Turians, Batarians, Krogan, Salarians, Quarians, and Drell.

(Also there is one new race going to be in ME3, it's a race of bird people but the name escapes me. So expect Harpy ladies :3)

 

[Mrsoupcup]

There are females in the diffrent races, just because they dont have tits do not make them any less female. Female hanar maybe have shorter tentacles or something.

See above post /\

 

[Syzygy23]

I wonder the same thing on many occasion. I think getting a glimpse of a female Tuarin or a female Drell would be awesome.

I remember watching an interview with the character designer of Garrus and the Tuarians and he spoke about how they had no idea what to do with female Tuarians - hence why they never introduced any into the Mass Effect universe. They were completely stumped. The one guy even said "What are we going to do? Add breasts? Add some lipstick?" They honestly can't conceive how to turn a Tuarian - or a Salarian, Drell, Volus, Vorcha, Batarian, etc. - into a female. It's almost like making a whole other alien.

In that respect making the female Quarians was easy! You could never see their faces so all the artists had to do was add breasts and hips and BAM, females!

My sympathies go out to the artists. It can't be easy, because no matter what they do they're going to piss someone off.

At least in Mass Effect 3 we get to see a female Krogan! Yay for that.

I'm not sure if this helps, but Taurian females can be seen in the Mass Effect comics. They look identical to the males except they have very short horn/fringes. They hardly look feminine.

Really? REALLY? As an artist myself, I can say IT'S NOT THAT HARD. Look, Bioware kinda turned 95% (guesstimate) of the alien races into "Star Trek Aliens" by making them all suspiciously human in form. (Seriously, does no one question the statistical improbability of all these intelligent races looking so similar to humans?) Seeing as they are going for a sense of comfortable familiarity for the audience with the aliens by giving them human like proportions, it follows suit that you differentiate the genders the same way you normally do with us. In short, what you did to make it clear Tali is a female you can do for random Turian NPC's.

 

[synobal]

I think some people here should google Fornax and download the fan published issue to satisfy their curiosity with some fan made concepts.

 

[FuzzyRaccoon]

EDIT: Woah no way! The krogan emissary was a male?! But his voice was so soft and girly!
O:

 

[Ulquiorra4sama]

So we won't feed the people of DeviantART any more strange ideas.

In all seriousness i think it's simply because they couldn't be bothered, and maybe because they don't think slapping random females on everywhere isn't in the spirit of Mass Effect.

Then again you might think they want a sexual icon with the whole FemShep thing they got going, but that's really the public's fault.

 

[FuzzyRaccoon]

2) Salarian females make up only about 1/8th of the race and are basically the political elite. Also tied up with horribly twisted contracts about breeding.

Uh, I have to wonder about how horrible those contracts are. If a female salarian is a political elite, and the breeding contracts are as strenuous as is to be believed, then they likely have their pick of the males. And Salarian's, from the way that they act in regards to those breeding contracts give no notion to their even being a sexual desire component involved. Then there are so many things that we don't rightly know about all that is involved. We don't have enough information to say they are wrong or twisted. For the salarian's they are likely a neccesity.

 

[Snake Plissken]

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST.

So apparently it isn't enough to put human women on a level playing field as men. What NEEDS to happen is that females of EVERY SPECIES need to be treated as equals to their male counterparts.

Wasn't this victory enough? Human men and women are treated as equals in Mass Effect, yet that STILL isn't enough to make everyone shut up for a second and think about those implications.

I swear, if I see another "I'M EXTREMELY OFFENDED. WHY AREN'T XXXXX MORE REPRESENTED IN MY FAVORITE GAME THREAD!?!?!?!?!?!", I'm leaving this goddamned site. I'll give that about 15 minutes or so.

 

[FuzzyRaccoon]

Then again you might think they want a sexual icon with the whole FemShep thing they got going, but that's really the public's fault.

I completely disagree with this. I think that people are simply taking it that way. Default male shep was attractive enough. He was made special, there were more details for him. The femshep was not given the same care. So they decided to do so now. What's wrong with them allowing the public to decide on that? And even people who say it's trite for the fans to pick hair color I find annoying. The defaults are locked in and cannot be altered. It would be ridiculously wonderful if they could, but they cannot. I for one, want a redheaded femshep in homage to my previous female playthroughs. I'd like the opportunity to play a femshep who's lips don't look ridiculous and annoying.

I don't see how that a sexualization at all.

 

[tehbeard]

Maybe they are in the space kitchens?

OT: This is a game whose primary focus has been on point gun at bad guy pull trigger/warp/order squadmate to kill it.