The Lost Avvar Origin from DAO

Accodring to the David Gaider livestream a few years ago (https://felassan.tumblr.com/post/631566059806359552/dragon-age-development-insights-from-david-gaider)

The Human Barbarian origin made the player Chasind. That origin went into the Chasind and their culture like 'This is the Chasind, here’s what they’re about’. But since this origin got cut, they didn’t really need to return ‘there’ anymore. DG does regret that they never rolled back to them in that same way. The issue was that to make the Chasind believable, they really needed to have their own outfits, and the devs didn’t have time to do this. This is a big part of why they were cut (similar to how qunari ended up not having horns and how there’s only a small number of body models etc).

Human Commoner and Human Barbarian were two completely separate and different origins that were cut. (See this article.)

The Human Commoner origin would have taken place in Redcliffe, and has been described by DG at various points as a 'Luke Skywalker' type story. There are what may be unused remnants of the story in the game's toolset files.

Q: As someone who has always been curious about the Human Commoner origin (and the Avvar origin), can I ask what these fundamental problems were, if you feel like going into details? I'm not angry they were cut, I understand some things have to go, I've just always wondered what they would have been like, so I'm curious about what the flaws were.

A: Hmm. Okay, I suppose it’s been long enough that there’s no real harm in discussing what went on with these.

The Human Commoner was originally envisioned as the “Luke Skywalker” origin—your PC starts off in a humdrum day on the farm, finding the mutilated corpse of a cow being the only portent of things to come, and ends up defending the farmhouse from a siege by darkspawn. Cue Duncan appearing when things seem darkest, recognizing your merits, and recruiting you.

The problem there was, at first, technical—namely that the siege of the farmhouse just couldn’t be done to the right effect. You ran around telling your family what to do, boarded up doors and windows, but having the darkspawn break in was hard to make look good, not to mention scaling the difficulty for a 1st level warrior/rogue.

The larger problem was, however, that the story just didn’t fit. We had to go through weird convolutions to justify Duncan taking an interest in you, and the first part of the story was just so terribly dull. Eventually we recognized that the “Luke Skywalker” origin was better tied to a Chosen One-type story, which DAO was not. The Human Commoner would have been better off being more of an analogue to the Dwarven Commoner, with the player being a bandit or thief and having a start more like Daveth, but by that point it was too late for a complete re-write. So the Origin was cut, chalked up to a bad concept.

The Human Barbarian origin was a much harder cut, actually. It went through a few re-writes, but I think most people on the team rather liked it. As I recall, the story had you attending a gathering of Avvar clans to prove your mettle—but you realize that another chief is using the gathering as a ploy to take power. You clan is wiped out, and you’re saved from a similar fate by Duncan. There was a plot later on to deal with that chief more permanently.

Initial problems had the Origin being far too Conan-esque, which was hard to mesh up with the rest of the game. We needed to “civilize” the Avvar a bit more than was originally envisioned, to avoid the issue of having to deal with “duh me not know nothing about you civilized folk” at every turn. That issue was dealt with, or at least in progress, when we ran into an issue with art resources…namely that we had to make a cut to a lot of planned art (the Qunari appearance was one such cut), and the resources for Avvar costumes and buildings were low-hanging fruit. These resources were not, after all, needed anywhere outside of the Origin plot. Left with the prospect of creating an Avvar society that looked almost exactly like everywhere else in Ferelden, we decided to cut it. We just couldn’t do it.

So there you go—the two big Origin cuts. I’ve no idea whether these would have ended up actually being fun, if we’d been able to complete them, and I know it’s always easy to imagine them being so, but of the two I kinda wish we’d kept the Avvar. I really like the Avvar lore, and it’s to my regret that we’ve never been able to squeeze it in anywhere since.

God, I wish Weekes would reveal more about his take on the Avvar origin. The fact he mentions the Urn Plot means that we can conclude the Avvar origin clearly revolved around it now.

No word back from Gaider, but I've looked over the david gaider livestream of DAO from felassan - in it Gaider points out

"The Urn plot went through several revisions and was originally a much bigger deal."

So with the Avvar origin being cut did that also mean the Urn plot was raipdly cut down to size too? Or was the Urn plot intended to be a bigger deal if it had Avvars in it or not?