I dont think they will take more part in ME4. We will prolly be given new races to explore
I at least hope that the new races will include an 'alien' alien species.
It would be a nice change of pace to simply see an alien that is actually different from humanity and not just a mouthpiece for [insert political/cultural/religious/etc. platform] in the setting. IMO.
Well, here... OP, what does an alien look to you? I mean, sure, I have a vague idea of what an alien looks like... It's got a big head, big black eyes, and is grey to green. And that's just a maybe, if you believe in UFO's. What I think you're upset about is the indifference the world shows to people. Stay with me here. Some people can't do certain things, so they suck at them. Or better yet, are lesser. That's a part of the beauty of this game. Because it shows that some people can't do certain things. But that's no reason that their lives don't matter as much as ours. In every single game (I think), Shepard said, "I'm fighting for everybody in the galaxy!" He didn't say, "I'm fighting for every biped in galaxy!"
You want an alien who looks like an alien (in other words, without being a bipedal creature) to do something that everybody else can do. It's possible, I just don't think it's probable.
Well, here... OP, what does an alien look to you? I mean, sure, I have a vague idea of what an alien looks like... It's got a big head, big black eyes, and is grey to green. And that's just a maybe, if you believe in UFO's.
An alien can take an number of appearances from the standard biped to the crazy amorphous blob. I will admit to a degree of favoritism concerning non-humanoids simply due to the exotic (non-human) appearance. And I will say that of the non-humanoid aliens the inscetoid ones would have to be my favorite, mainly because our own insects are so prevalent and industrious; ants form 15–25% of the terrestrial animal biomass on the planet; and the thought of taking that concept and applying it to a larger, more intelligent, space faring species is interesting to me.
What I think you're upset about is the indifference the world shows to people. Stay with me here. Some people can't do certain things, so they suck at them. Or better yet, are lesser. That's a part of the beauty of this game. Because it shows that some people can't do certain things.
If I had to sum up why I want to see aliens like the Rachni and Elcor to take on more prominent roles in future titles in one sentence I would have to say:
"Humans are boring"
Nothing against BioWare's characters, or the political/cultural/religious issues they use said characters to tackle, but I can turn on the news at any time and see that 24/7 in the real world. Mass Effect is a science fiction setting, I want to go out and discover the people, places, things, etc. that are different from us, to see the truly alien side of the universe. I enjoy the human characters and elements in the setting don't get me wrong; but there comes a point when it seems that all we are getting is the human side and all of the interesting aliens are being shoved into the background. I know that aliens like the Elcor and Hanar are unable to the exact things that bipeds can do, and having diversity in the galaxy is a good thing, but relegating them to the sidelines, or worse; in the Elcor's and Hanar's case; turning them into the joke races because they can't do the things we can, or they look different, or talk funny, etc. just makes the universe feel shallow and very human centric.
And those are just the combat oriented aspects that aliens like the Elcor and Rachni bring to the table. They have other advantages and disadvantages compared to humanity, but are kept in the background because they can't do 100% of the things that humans can, forgetting that many of these aliens would actually excel in areas that humans would be hard pressed or unable to do.
But that's no reason that their lives don't matter as much as ours. In every single game (I think), Shepard said, "I'm fighting for everybody in the galaxy!" He didn't say, "I'm fighting for every biped in galaxy!" You want an alien who looks like an alien (in other words, without being a bipedal creature) to do something that everybody else can do. It's possible, I just don't think it's probable.
Shepard was fighting to save the galaxy it's true, but s/he was more than willing to throw other races under the bus to save Earth, even though it; until the last bit of ME 3; was tactfully unimportant. Even more telling is that the more human aliens are afforded more worth in the eyes of galaxy than the non-human ones:
or
In those two scenarios the Rachi and Geth would be the better choice, militarily speaking, since the Rachni can breed combat capable solders in a matter of weeks instead of years for the Krogan, all Rachni have a built in QEC, Rachni have their own natural weapons and armor on par with the galaxy's weapons and defenses, and Rachni are far more disciplined than the warlike Krogan. Likewise the Geth don't need to eat, or sleep, or breath an atmosphere, they aren't vulnerable to fatal infection from contact with the common cold, and their weapons and ships are built to spec instead of being second hand purchases like the Quarians.
Obviously, having all four species help in the fight against the Reapers would be better simply due to numbers and diverse tactics employed by each species, but the narrative places and implied sense of worth on the races that are more like us.
To be honest I am perfectly fine with the Volus, Elcor and Hanar being races that almost purely exist for comic relief. I sure hope that future ME games will make references to new Blasto movies 
And the Rachni are basicly Mass Effects version of Giger's Alien.
The rachni and the geth have both been hacked two times by the reapers. Who wants to take a chance on a third? Well, me, 'cause I saved them all on my last play through.
However, would you be so willing to have a double agent watching your back, knowing that he's a double agent? That is the kind of position that the quarians are in. That's the kind'a position that the rest of the galaxy is in. Kind'a a mixed metaphor here, I'll grant you. But I think you get the gist.
EDIT : Forget where I saw it, maybe on one of the Spore videos. I really suggest you go and d/l the spore creature creator and play around with it. You'll soon find that while you can have an alien with multiple arms and legs, it really isn't necessary. Most things on or in our universe are either bipedal or quadruped. This is backed up by some pretty high level science that I won't get into here. But I really suggest that you take a look at the game of Spore, because it (basically) shows you how evolution happens.
You can have something with three legs. It just would look like a mutant out of Thunder Dome though.
EDIT x 2 : And beside all this, good and bad are moral objections. In other words, human objections.
Guest_La Petite Fille de la Mer_*
I was actually looking for sciences ideas on alien creatures in our galaxy and all the pretty big name scientists presented monstrosities for aliens.
Editing my original slide show... I found this quote--
"Most biologists would agree that if you started the Earth over again and merely let the same random factors operate, you would never wind up with anything looking like a human being"...and I think this might be a Carl Sagan quote (I think?).
Maybe scientists changed their minds about this since then. Either way I think we have enough human aliens in ME, and hope we get more alien types that are not human in ME:NEXT.
Isn't indoctrination analogous to getting hacked?
The rachni and the geth have both been hacked two times by the reapers. Who wants to take a chance on a third? Well, me, 'cause I saved them all on my last play through.
However, would you be so willing to have a double agent watching your back, knowing that he's a double agent? That is the kind of position that the quarians are in. That's the kind'a position that the rest of the galaxy is in. Kind'a a mixed metaphor here, I'll grant you. But I think you get the gist.
EDIT : Forget where I saw it, maybe on one of the Spore videos. I really suggest you go and d/l the spore creature creator and play around with it. You'll soon find that while you can have an alien with multiple arms and legs, it really isn't necessary. Most things on or in our universe are either bipedal or quadruped. This is backed up by some pretty high level science that I won't get into here. But I really suggest that you take a look at the game of Spore, because it (basically) shows you how evolution happens.
You can have something with three legs. It just would look like a mutant out of Thunder Dome though.
EDIT x 2 : And beside all this, good and bad are moral objections. In other words, human objections.
That's true. I meant the next big boss.
That's true. I meant the next big boss.
To be honest I am perfectly fine with the Volus, Elcor and Hanar being races that almost purely exist for comic relief. I sure hope that future ME games will make references to new Blasto movies
The Krogan are basically Klingons. The Asari are basically space elves. All of the species of Mass Effect take inspiration from one or more sources, I don't see how that would preclude a future title from featuring them in a lesser capacity.
Haha. If the Rachnii were hijacked again, by a new uber-threat, I'd lead the genocide myself. That would be ridiculous. What more could you do?
The Rachni are almost the Dalish of ME in this sense 
Though to be fair the Queen wasn't so much hijacked as she was captured. Overall not much difference; we still end up fighting Reaperized Rachni, but the major difference is the Queen, for all intents and purposes, seems to be immune or very nearly immune to the effects of indoctrination. I mean why else would the Reapers have to leave her shackled and retaining her free will? Why would the Reapers not increase the effects of indoctrination and leave the Queen a drooling empty shell? It's not like higher thought processes are needed to birth her young, especially since the Reapers just take the newly born Rachni and turn them into husks anyway. Unless of course the Reaper's ultimate weapon of indoctrination didn't work on the Queen.
On a different topic, I find it most interesting that the Rachni are the only species to actually support Shepard and prepare for the Reaper invasion (if s/he spared the Queen in ME 1), and yet they are easily defeated by the Reapers off camera despite spending 2+ years building up an army. The major part of it is because the Rachni could be killed in the first game (which I think is a mistake, simply because allowing such huge decisions makes any meaningful follow up impossible for future titles, I mean look at the handling of the ME 2 squad mates in ME 3) but I can't help but wonder if all of that build up was thrown away because, well the Rachni aren't 'human enough' to be shown coming to save the day. It can't be the non-humanoid aliens rushing to the aid of the humans, it has to be the humans coming to the defense of the non-humanoids and then being able to deign whether they are useful or not.
IMO, the rachni are the super threat that just won't die and they don't mean to be bad, it's just that they're so easily taken over. I mean, all you really have to do is capture a queen (or an egg, if you remember from the first game), and then separate her from her young. The rachni wars were a little different, and not much is known about about them. However, I believe that the reapers soured their song, and drove them to war. Please, if anybody has any more info on the rachni wars, I'm all ears.
I'm making it sound easier then it is. But you get the gist. If you had the money and the time, you could construct a chamber much like we see in the first game.
IMO, the rachni are the super threat that just won't die and they don't mean to be bad, it's just that they're so easily taken over. I mean, all you really have to do is capture a queen (or an egg, if you remember from the first game), and then separate her from her young. The rachni wars were a little different, and not much is known about about them. However, I believe that the reapers soured their song, and drove them to war. Please, if anybody has any more info on the rachni wars, I'm all ears.
I'm making it sound easier then it is. But you get the gist. If you had the money and the time, you could construct a chamber much like we see in the first game.
The only info I can add is from the Leviathan DLC. An NPC suggests that the Leviathans may have been manipulating the Rachnii, rather than the Reapers. I don't really find that argument all that compelling, but whatever.
At the risk of derailing the topic of this thread, I will say that I find the theory that the Leviathans were behind the Rachni aggression to be far more likely than Reaper involvement.
Every time we've seen the Reapers use other species as their pawns in a brute force manner it has involved husks, or them assuming control of a synthetic species. It seems far more likely that the Leviathans were trying to use the Rachni to get to the Citadel and stop the cycle, especially since Sovereign had only recently (at most 30 years before ME 1) started to seek out pawns in order to gain access to the Citadel Relay. Plus the whole explanation about the organic QEC applied to both the Rachni and the Leviathans, so its seems a more likely fit. Also, a hostile takeover of galactic government by an organic species of 'space bugs' would be far less likely to draw the Reapers' attention than one by a synthetic uprising.
IMO, the rachni are the super threat that just won't die and they don't mean to be bad, it's just that they're so easily taken over. I mean, all you really have to do is capture a queen (or an egg, if you remember from the first game), and then separate her from her young. The rachni wars were a little different, and not much is known about about them. However, I believe that the reapers soured their song, and drove them to war. Please, if anybody has any more info on the rachni wars, I'm all ears.
I'm making it sound easier then it is. But you get the gist. If you had the money and the time, you could construct a chamber much like we see in the first game.
Rachni aren't easily taken over, the only two species that have managed to exert any kind of reasonable control over them have been the Reapers and/or Leviathans, both of which exist in the God-Tier of Mass Effect species and can just as easily assume control of any of the other races in the setting.
Binary Helix may have acquired a royal egg but they by no means had the Rachni 'under control' as evidenced by the fact that their research facility of Peak 15 was overrun in a matter of hours. Even writer's pet Cerberus tried to control them but even they failed to contain the Rachni; and the crazy 'easier to control' Rachni to boot.
[EDIT]
Even the mighty Prothean Empire; the civilization that fostered the creation of the Rachni; couldn't control them.
[/EDIT]
The Queen's link to her young and the Rachni's hive-like mentality are vulnerabilities to be sure, but it isn't some weakness that any joe schmo with an egg and money can exploit. Even if the Queen is compromised or removed from the equation the higher level drones and brood warriors are capable of operating with a surprising amount of autonomy; being able to establish colonies, escape confinement and engage in combat with other advanced species on their own.
Seeing the Rachni as a threat to all that is good and human(-like) is part of why I want to see more about them or aliens like them. "We must kill you because you are too different from us" is so cliched and shallow IMO. Mass Effect should be about discovery and seeing our place in the universe, not making the universe conform to our standards of what is acceptable.
Yet, Cerberus was experimenting on them in ME1, explained by Miranda in ME2 (I think). They had to get the eggs from somewhere. Yeh, agreed, they could've taken them from Binary Helix. But according to Miranda, they were "too hard to control". Meaning that once TIM had learned that he could control things, like Thorian Creepers, rachni, etc, he wanted to find out how. He didn't care about the results. He had his eyes on the bigger prize, which was controlling the reapers.
EDIT : As a matter of fact, I'm willing to state right here and right now, that TIM had a sleeper agent inside of Binary Helix. Why do I say this? Because he didn't want anybody else to know about mind controlling effects. Same with the Thorian. Power is a corrupting influence.
At the risk of derailing the topic of this thread, I will say that I find the theory that the Leviathans were behind the Rachni aggression to be far more likely than Reaper involvement.
Every time we've seen the Reapers use other species as their pawns in a brute force manner it has involved husks, or them assuming control of a synthetic species. It seems far more likely that the Leviathans were trying to use the Rachni to get to the Citadel and stop the cycle, especially since Sovereign had only recently (at most 30 years before ME 1) started to seek out pawns in order to gain access to the Citadel Relay. Plus the whole explanation about the organic QEC applied to both the Rachni and the Leviathans, so its seems a more likely fit. Also, a hostile takeover of galactic government by an organic species of 'space bugs' would be far less likely to draw the Reapers' attention than one by a synthetic uprising.
The rachni could but the elcor and hanar just can't take them seriously when shep calls a hanar a big stupid jellyfish. Thats when i just can't take them seriously ever since then.
Volus,hanar,elcor are just comic relief races and that's there role in mass effect.
The hanar themselves don't have to do anything. They rely on automation, drell workers and assassins to do their dirty work.
Yeah, they really undermined the Hanar with the out of control, never-ending Blasto joke and then the "big stupid jellyfish" scene.
I sort of hate that scene. It feels like some underlying speciesism/racism rose to the surface when Shepard said that. It would be like someone using a racial slur under duress. I may let it pass, but it would get me thinking.
Clearly, a Paragon Shep who has saved aliens left and right for 3 games isn't a "speciesist" (or whatever the hell you'd call it), but that doesn't make that moment okay.
I think it was a poor decision to include it. I've never liked it.
I didn't get the scene on my last playthrough (non-import run). We wondered if it's related to some wrong flag for ME1 Preaching Hanar quest when importing it to ME3. Here is the video
I almost went into this in my post, as well. Neither explanation works for me, really, since neither fits with what we know about the Reapers and/or Leviathan. I think they had the queen claim "the Reapers made us do it" in order to paint them in a more sympathetic light. They should've just let them be a species that really screwed up, and one for whom the Council species had legitimate reasons for complaint and fear.
I agree. Truth be told, I wish that there wasn't a catch-all 'The Reapers/Leviathans made me do it." whenever we were dealing with people and factions that did horrible acts. The Rachni were war-like and their aggressive nature would have factored in nicely into their invasion of Citadel Space, instead we are told that the species was coerced into waging a war against the Council races. I would much rather have preferred that the Rachni were aggressive, got wiped out, and the last surviving Queen realized that her species' hostile nature is what got them (nearly) extinct in the first place.
In fact, the Queen's dialogue and her willingness to let herself die (if you spare her in ME 1 and then leave her in ME 3) makes more sense if you can see it as trying to atone for her race's past deeds. Why would a person being mind controlled, or otherwise forced against their will need to apologize or view themselves as having committed a heinous crime? The whole "We're totally innocent of invading your territory because 'mind control' but we're totally willing to let you kill us because we invaded your territory." bit doesn't match up very well IMO.
At the least the Rachni were willing to admit to the atrocities committed by their species though, the Krogan love to gloss over the fact that they dropped asteroids on Turian worlds in favor of holding up dead Krogan babies.
I didn't get the scene on my last playthrough (non-import run). We wondered if it's related to some wrong flag for ME1 Preaching Hanar quest when importing it to ME3. Here is the video
I love the way Renegade Shepard justifies the Hanar homeworld being lost as:
"The Hanar did this to themselves."
Why, because of one person being indoctrinated?
Going by that logic, Humans are to blame for the loss of Earth because that one time a human was indoctrinated and we should accept that it is lost forever.
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