I watched the Dragon Age in 5 minutes video to try and remember what happened in the previous games and I remembered that there was an expansion I never played and my dude died at the end of Origins.

It seems like Awakening was pretty dependent on your dude not sacrificing themselves and should still be alive at the time of Inquisition. Does anyone know if the story is a direct continuation of what happened in the first game or should I expect vague references that I'll barely get since I played the game 5 years ago. The video seemed to imply that both The Warden and Hawke could be involved in Inquisition.

How did they deal with you choosing the sacrifice option when you played Awakening? Did they just say nope and make you choose a different ending to Origins or did they write around it?

If past BioWare games are any indication, I wouldn't expect the prior player characters to have anything more than a cameo role in DA:I. Hawke might get more just because he/she was guaranteed to be alive at the end of DA:2, but I don't think the involvement would be earth shattering.

Regarding the Awakening expansion, if your Warden sacrificed himself or herself, then the character for Awakening is another Warden from Orlais that the Grey Wardens appoint to run the order in Ferelden.

Well several major characters from both Origins and DA2 are major characters in Inquisition, including Morrigan, Leliana, Varric, and Cassandra. Hawke is also definitely in it, as he/she has appeared in several different trailers. I haven't seen anything about the Warden.

Reviews I've read said the game makes quite a few callbacks to previous games. Enough that if you haven't played or forgot the previous games you probably won't get the most out of it. It souldn't be quite the same as jumping into ME3, but it seems to have more ties than DA2 did.

Technically if you import your dead warden into awakening the game just pretended you didn't sacrifice yourself, which was pretty lame. You had to start a new file to get the orlesian warden. But you can set your warden to be dead in the keep and still mess with the awakening choices.

Thing is, DA2 choices were kinda arbitrary cus specific things would happen no matter what, like youe homey setting off that bomb. So there's not that much to really feed off of other than what side you decided to help in the very last mission. Like that's literally the only choice that matters in that game. I literally saw both endings by loading a save a half hour before the game wraps up. Its nonsense. So Im not even worried about it cus for anything significant I wasn't given a choice in the 2nd game.

It's sort of a continuation of what happened in DA2, but only really connected to Origins in that it's in the same world. There are a couple of characters returning from the previous games in various capacities, but it's not like you'll need to be intimately familiar with them to follow what's going on. I'd expect vague references which you won't get, and which it won't matter that you won't get. As long as you can remember how the Chantry / Mages / Templars related to each other you'll be fine.

They completely bodged the issue with your Warden possibly being dead for Awakenings. You could either play as a new Warden from Orlais (which I did), or just pretend that you hadn't died after all (with no explanation - just forget it happened and move on). It's not clear how Inquisition will handle this, if at all.

DA2 basically amounts to 'Anders goes 9/11 on the Chantry and kicks off a mage rebellion which spreads across half of the continent'. It doesn't really matter what you chose to do as Hawke - the outcome was the same regardless (Hawke was effectively just a guy that was present, so I have no idea why everyone is oh so interested in finding him). This more or less sets the scene for Inquisition: Mages are in open rebellion, there's a peace summit to try and resolve it and then everything blows up.... again. Demons happen and you need to stop them and find out what happened.

There is a DA2 DLC which apparently may or may not involve the Inquisition baddie, but nobody played that anyway so I doubt it will matter if you haven't.

@jimbo: Since the only way to import your choices is through the keep I don't think there's anything they need to worry about in regards to awakening. You can either make your warden alive or dead. There's no choice for making them dead and then suddenly revived in awakening with no explanation.