Non-Humanoid aliens were always difficult to pull off in the Startrek shows - Both costumes and CGI have their limits if you need to produce for the screen, and real life actors with bumps on their foreheads are more easy to create.

But now, everything in the game is "CGI", so to speak, so we could have more freedom. So what I would like to see is more non-humanoid aliens in the game. The Undine already exist, and the Tholians are already in the works (and so might be the Iconians?).

Of course, neither of those 3 really suites for player characters, as they are clearly not members of the currently playable factions. But the technical foundation of these models could be used to create additional races, perhaps even work their way into an Alien creator with more customization options.

My real intention here is to speed up the development of such aliens by financing it with C-Store money, and give Foundry Authors more costume options to work with.

For the C-Store option to be really attractive, a racial respec might be desirable for some players, but that is another topic.
What I could see in the package:

• Buying the Race grants you the option to create a new non-humanoid alien.
• You also gain the option to claim one customizable rare Bridge Officer with the non-humanoid alien variant. The BO would be unique and not tradeable. It should have no too strong traits (No power for money!) or BO abilities.

In addition, the new alien BOs also are added as very rare and unusual in the game, and become useable in the Foundry for every player.

Possible unique Non-Humanod Traits (the Alien might have to pre-select 1 or 2 of them.

• Multipod: Knockdown Resistance and a passive bonus to ground speed.
• Alien Perspective: Buff to Stealth Perception and resistance to psychic effects
• Siliconbased Life: Physical and kinetic damage resistance
• Abberation: Generates more Aggro
• Mental Assault: (similar to Reman power)

Suitable Powers. (I am not sure if it has to be a Rank III ability in the Lt.Cmdr slot or a Rank III ability in the Cmdr slot, so I offer both choices):

• Beam Target Subsystem Engines or Weapons
• Attack Pattern D
• Boarding Party III
• Emergency Power to Weapons III (is trainable, but are there any rank III Lt.Cmdr powers that aren't?)
• Polarize Hull III
• Gravity Well III

That is always what dstahl said - the C-Store allows them to have more people working on the game then the subscription money alone would, and allows them to put in stuff like TOS Uniforms or Excelsior Retrofits - before any specific in-game need would require it already.

Doesn't look like there are many people interested in non-humanoids after all. Dang.

No Xindi, Undine, Horta, Hamalki or Tholian look-alikes of interest?

I would love for Cryptic to add non-humanoid playable aliens to the game. I have been reading the Titan novels and the fact that a lot of Riker's crew are non-humanoids has got me wanting to play one in STO now.

Mustum ... A very well thought out post.

I've always thought that undine models would make a nice base for introducing Edosians as a playable race.

However there're several big hurdles to getting generic multi-legged body types in the game. Quite a few animations can't be moved over to a multi-legged form without serious reworking and all of the uniform clothing skins would have to be remade to fit onto the new body type.

And this would all have to be redone for each non-humanoid body ... 3-legged, 4-legged, 0-legged ... etc.

However I think that the draenei on WoW has shown that a digitigrade biped (i.e. creature with 2 "cat" legs) would be the simplest and probably should be the first non-human-shaped body type to try.

I wouldn't expect all the uniforms to work, it would more likely be a very small set of specialized uniforms (possibly only to hold the rank isnignia, Fleet Emblem and the Communicator). I think one of the biggest challenges is making the equipment animations. Whatever races are added, they will have to equip kits and weapons.

Reading this and thinking of the three-legged Undine I have the Triexians/Edosians in mind.

A totally awesome idea!