Ah yes, the precursor/creator race one, that's common too. Yup, like almost every other scifi franchise that bothers with aliens on a budget. But what more could you do with Helots given they're amphibians. You can get your worm or spiderlike/insectoid aliens but they often still go more or less humanoid in the latter cases, and for making minis are potentially mouldshredders. You can try a floating shadow type thing but you just get dudes in trenchcoats. Objectively and critically speaking... He isn't. Common tropes, clunky dialogue, Boring Invincible Villains, plot armour, vagueness rather than mystery, reference heavy character design, and use of "gratuitous language" such as a passage dropping a random word of Spanish or Japanese followed by a translation note... When you could have just had the speakers dialogue be translated like every other word they said. These aren't always bad things but in combination, they don't often result in a particularly high quality of writing. One double edged sword of worldbuilding, in fairness, is you can get too dry and academic in it, especially with a detached omniscient narration. The flipside is you get too storylike and harm suspension of disbelief. Infinity is prone more to the latter imo, but there's times where in trying to avoid one Gutier seems to walk right into the other. Look at Harry Potter for a pretty good example of decent worldbuilding, albeit one being pissed away by the crazy writer retconning everything on Twitter while being a Centrist Mum. It used pretty derivative and referential ideas, ie mythology and fable, with some different approaches and ideas. But in the end the actual world built isn't particularly unique. If it's not one of your first encounters with the genre or one if the first things you ever read, like it is for much of the cult of Potter, you may feel that what unique elements there are could be and indeed sometimes were accidents from the crazy writer. She writes Star Wars but Lord of the Rings with Nazis in an English Boarding School... That is in Scotland for some reason. But despite that, we can still see a cohesion to the world building even if there are gaping logic holes here and there, and it's if not unique, then distinctive. Infinity in contrast struggles at times to be distinctive, but in a way, the cheesy pulpy familiar feeling setup somewhat ironically is the distinction factor. And when it tries to avert that, it's a turn off. Uprising suffered perhaps from trying to go new places, more serious places than many of us were used to in our Infinity mindsets, and as a result? Contentious to say the least.
This annoys me a lot as well. Not specifically CB, but nearly every alien ever is humanoid (like the whole star trek IP (ok, in the old times they had to do "dudes in latex masks")), even the chaos demons from gw are two legged two armed one headed dudes. Or when you see some creature that's just a mess of tentacles, you can figure out some notion of head or legs and arms. Because of inverse scuba suit?
I assume first contact would also go something like this: Situation 1: Humanoid but fishy Pano: "Ah hello relatable humanoid fishman, would you like to be subsumed into our space empire?" Helot: [Answer does not matter] Pano: "Excellent it's settled" Situation 2: Not humanoid Pano: "ARRRGH Horrifying 9ft Crab Monsters!" Helot: [Indeterminable yet somehow courteous crab screeching] Pano: "We must purge the Xenos menace [produces flamer]"
Those PanO Hellots are really, really good. My 25-points/1-CAP Neurocinetics Chaksa is very sad right now.
Yup. Every miniatures seller has flat-out said that humanoid aliens sell better. ranging from ~2x to 10x better.
If someone is interested there is a interesting phenomenon running right now. PanO forums are all pink/unicorns/friendship, if you happen to overlook those dead bodies of people who could not handle the excitement (and died from stroke). #itsgoodtobeblue
Without getting Supportware Hacking. Without getting two levels of Unconscious. Without built-in Shock inmunity. Without being a murder-machine during Active Turn. Without being fast. Without BTS. But it can go Prone. Yeah, awesome tradeoff.
