I don't think that this game ever really boasted completely original race designs. Either way, you can sum up literally any race as "<blank>-People", so that's kinda a bad argument.
What? I just got through explaining that there are races where you can't describe them as just "[Blank]-people" without horrifically oversimplifying it.
In addition, the playable races are all pretty well animated, and the simplistic design of the races is both charming and memorable.
I'm opinionated because A) There's some fanart out there of around twice the resolution which looks significantly better (In my personal opinion, at least) and B) I am tired as stuff of m-muh pixel graphics.
Besides that, every race also has a cultural theme and style, so I don't know why you're complaining about Starbound's art team being 'not great'.
I'm complaining about it because some of that stuff looks ugly. Or boring. Or unfitting. Or any combination of the three.
Seriously why do the novakids have a forgetin' skull motif. They don't have skulls. Or skeletons.
Maybe in Mass Effect avians wouldn't fit in, but maybe that's because they're two different games with different necessary levels of design and detail.
I'm not saying I'm expecting 300x300 sprites, I'm saying the races
can be described simply as "[Blank]-people" with little to no degree of oversimplification, whereas in Mass Effect, they cannot. The races in Mass Effect were neat because they
didn't necessarily look exactly like something we could relate to (Turians being a good example there, they looked unique), but were similar enough to still be familiar. (Brogans, salarians. Not the asari. That entire race is stuff.)
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