Aliens

It's curious to me that while Star Wars prominently has many aliens, of course, the story is almost exclusively about regular humans, with few and very modern exceptions. In fact, other than Chewbacca, whom George Lucas loves to throw in for gratuitous cameos every chance he gets (and Yoda, maybe, to a lesser extent) very few aliens play a prominent role in the story at all.

In SWTOR there are lots of aliens, and you can play as alien characters even, although I haven't really done much of that. Perhaps more annoyingly, many of the aliens speak in their alien language, which probably saved a ton on voice acting, which is why they have much more of it than I'd like. 

I always kind of laughed a bit at how SWTOR used very few alien face models, and how closely their face models conformed to original trilogy stuff. Every single Devaronian looks exactly like that one guy in the cantina scene, for instance. Every single Hutt looks exactly like Jabba from the original trilogy. Hutts got a lot more variety, at least in some media, like the Clone Wars TV show. Then again, those may have been cartoonish exaggerations. In live action, the Hutts all look considerably more like Jabba from the original trilogy. Curiously, Jabba's scene in the Special Edition of the first Star Wars movie maybe looks like the least like Jabba of the original trilogy; when he later makes an appearance in The Phantom Menace with Gardulla the Hutt, both of them are considerably better CGI and look considerably more like what you expect Hutts to look like. When the Twins show up in the ridiculous Book of Boba Fett, they at least look an awful lot like Hutts, and in fact look an awful lot like Jabba. They look a little too CGI for my taste, but still the direction of the visual design is very clear. So, that's actually one where SWTOR's lack of visual variety ended up coincidentally being a winner. Their variation on Hutts amounts to palette swapping the colors of the models and occasionally putting something like an efficiency scanner on the face. One of them even has a cyborg robot arm, if I remember right.

Not that I care all that much about Hutts. As behind the scenes movers and manipulators, they're more like plot devices than like characters anyway.

I bring this up, because Youtube has been recommending some Dune lore videos to me lately, and while I'm not really a huge Dune fan, I have enjoyed the more recent movie and am looking forward to seeing part 2 later this week. I've also watched the Sci-Fi channel Dune miniseries that came out about twenty years ago, and years ago I listened to the audio-book while commuting to work. Only the first book; I didn't really love it, so I didn't go on, but I can still recognize its prominence as a benchmark in the genre nonetheless. Regardless, the Dune series is an interesting benchmark, because it's certainly very prominent and influential. Dune, of course, rather famously doesn't have any aliens at all. All of the "aliens" are just highly derived and evolved or bred forms of humans; the mentats, the Tleilaxu, the Navigators, etc. were developed/bred/evolved to replace things like computers. I've been giving some thought to how humano-centric I want SOX to be, relative to some of its "competitors" and the answer is quite a lot. I fudge the definition a bit, with my various races of xenohumans; completely, genetically human, but not originating on Earth, nor sharing Earth-like phenotypal features. Y'know, blue people, red people, etc. Kind of like Dune in that way, although less radical. A blue-skinned person is less radical than one of the Navigators.

Frankly, I think even this is a reversion to an older form. My xenohumans are much more like the various races of Barsoom than they are like aliens. And ERB didn't quibble about human-ness; Dejah Thoris laid an egg for Carthoris to be hatched from, for instance, but other than gratuitous weirdness like that every once in a while, the Red Men, the Yellow Men, even the Therns and the First Born are all treated in pretty much every way exactly like humans. Just with exotic cultures and phenotype details, like the Therns being bald and the Red Men being, well... red.