From Hellgatewiki.com

The Morphoid is one of the more amusing monsters in Hellgate: London. They appear as tiny, popcorn-like gonads, and can be slaughtered instantly in that form. A few of them though, especially if you give them time, will morph into large, quadrupedal, T-rex like dinosaur things. As you see here. They're formidable foes in this form, capable of dealing nasty bites. The key then is to mow them down while they're still small. It's tempting to let a few grow up though, just to see what funny beasts they become. After all, you've got to have a little love for a monster that's so eager to eat you it's slobbering.

Caste: Beast
Rank: Lesser Demon
Subtypes: Unknown
Special: Tiny popcorn creatures occasionally grow to adult size in less than a second.

• See all the Morphoid shots in our image gallery.

The Morphoid is a bizarre creature, capable of growing from a pod the size of a football into a monster larger than a human in a blink. How did it come about?

Morpho Jr. was an evolutionary design. Our outsourced artists at Massive Black provided a variety of concepts from which our Art Director began providing input. Eventually a basic arthropod evolved into a more tiger-like creature. That eventually became the final large part of Morpho.

Here's an early quote from Phil. "He's bigger than would seem "possible" coming out of corpses. That's part of the weirdness of it. Like in Men in Black, that bug alien in the beginning that stuffed himself inside the redneck's skin."
--Ivan Sulic, Chinese RPG interview, mid-2006.

What's it like to battle them? Flux got a chance at E3 2006, and wrote about his experience in the caption of this screenshot. A quote:

These tiny things and big things are the same thing; note how similar their fanged little pie holes are to the mouths of the big ones? I encountered swarms of the little, popcorn-like beasties in the sewers while playing at E3, and as the Flagship guys told me, they occasionally transform into the big ones. It's quite a sudden process too; you're mowing down a lawn of the tiny ones (they die very easily to any ranged weapon) and suddenly one of them lurches and jumps and in a second it's taller than you are.

Their transformation rate certainly will change for the final game; they were hardly ever growing large at E3; you literally had to find a bunch and ignore their ankle biting while waiting for one to grow up. Flagship guys told me they used to change too often, and now it had been turned down too low and would be increased after E3. No worries though; fine-tuning is what play testing is all about.

Community Day Update

Flux, admin of the Unofficial HGL Site, reported on Morphoids after some HGL play time during the 2007 Community Day event. (Registration required to read Flux's full four-page mega report.)

Morpho Jr. is a weird, quadruped dinosaur sort of thing. They appear as tiny little gonad things, as you see in the screens on the wiki page, but if not killed quickly they transform into horse-sized beasties with T-rex mouths. They're actually not very hard, at least not early on, but the speed with which they grow in size is surprising when you first see it.