Aramintai wrote...
It's obvious that horned Qunari concept for DAII was made to explain why ogres have horns. Since darkspawn resemble their original forms, be it tall hurlocks (humans), short genlocks (dwarves), pointy eared shrieks (elves) it was only logical to question why ogres were so different from qunari.
As to why horns weren't implemented in the first game I'm thinking it would be either of these explanations:
- During the first game development devs didn't have the horned qunari concept in mind. Or didn't link qunari and ogres until the late stage.
- Horned ogre concept art was just too awesome to throw it away. And I seem to recall some dev said that in the early stage it had even bigger horns, so they even had to tell concept artist to make him less exaggerated.
- Sten is a companion and you would want him to wear any standard armor you find just like with the other companions. So that means no horns protruding from holes in bucket-helmet. Making his model unique would be too much effort in designing armor meshes exclusively for him. Same goes for other qunari in the first game. In DAII every companion has unique model and armor, which you can't change at your leisure, so even if devs decided to add a horned qunari companion in DAII it could have been done. But since qunari in DA II are just anther type of enemy devs were free to change them as they saw fit, so they decided to make them more ogre resembling, even at the expense on the continuity.
Personally, I think that new qunari model is more interesting and really distinguishes their race from others. In the first game they looked just like large humans.
The main reason in the discrepancy is the first one, in my opinion, which also leads to the other possible reasons that you have mentioned. To support your claim, I must point out the non-consistency in the codex entries in Origins, regarding the Ogres. On one hand, as some have pointed out, the entry for the Ogre states that these creatures appear during a blight - but the only blight prior to the fifth one was some 200 years before the Qunari landed in Thedas. On the other hand, the Brood Mother entry clearly states that ogres are born from qunari-sorta-Brood Mothers. So this is how I picture it:
-the dev team created horned ogres
-later they came up with the idea of the Brood Mother boss and consequtively the lore surrounding the Brood Mothers and the reproduction of darkspawn. Or vice versa, doesn't matter.
-they realised that Ogres being related to qunari is an awesome idea, Ogres with horns is an awesome idea and thus qunari with horns is an awesome idea.
-they realised, however, that they didn't have the resources (e.g. time) to change everything about Sten and to make new models for the helmets that are put on Sten and so on and so forth. They decided to leave the qunari the way they are in Origins and to apply the new look in future iterations of the DA franchise. After all, according to the dev team, work on DA2 had begun before Origins was released, which could mean that by the time DA:O came out, they had begun contemplating changing the qunari in futrure.
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