Yepper, agree completely. It has nothing to do with being lazy, someone might have no desire to play older games but still might want to see different paths in DAI. DG said that if you did the Dark Ritual that the choice "won't be ignored" and "have more than a passing reference in DAI." IMO that's pretty significant and a new player might want to tinker with the choices in the Keep to see the variable outcomes in DAI.
Part of the purpose of the Keep is so that people are not required to play previous games.
As far as a codex goes, I don't think it's necessary. The Keep has a description of the quest that's satisfactory for the most part. If a player wants to delve deeper into the implications of the quest or other lore aspects the DAwiki is always there for that purpose. I am a big advocate of accommodating new players to a franchise and doing things to reduce confusion -- it was part of my Keep Beta application --, but BioWare doesn't have to spoon feed everything to those players. There ARE other resources available and if they are really interested a minor amount of effort (read: a simple Google search) is needed to find out some things.
Well I'm sorry this is the case for you where you live, but it doesn't apply to everyone. On Amazon you can buy ALL three types (PC disc, Xbox 360, PS3, as well as PC download) of DAO Ultimate Edition and DA2 (standard). I've been preordering games and expansions from them for many years and have never had a problem. Ever.
But the point is, some people still prefer physical copies. Like for example, I have the Blu-Ray of Ginger Snaps. I went nuts when it was announced, preordered it on Amazon, and paid it off with a gift card to just be 100% sure nothing stopped me from getting it release day (and in fact due to shipping times, I got it a day sooner... bad Amazon!). I could have gotten it a lot cheaper from iTunes. But, I wanted the blu-ray, the physical copy of one of my favorite movies. As for the preorders thing, I will admit I've never preordered from Amazon, but release day shipping is hella expensive when I can just drive down to GameStop and pick it up. Costs me maybe $1 compared to $10-15 for release day shipping. Glad you have $15 to throw away on shipping for a game you can just as easily drive 5 miles and pick up.
"Doesn't apply to everyone" really you had to tell me that? Thanks, I swear I didn't know that I wasn't living in a huge metropolitan area.
Looking at your links, yes it looks like for those games there are still reasonable prices, so it would be easy to order them from Amazon but that isn't the case with all games, or even in my experience most games. It's especially not the case if one wants to digital download the Xbox 360 version. There is no "Ultimate" or other package deal, so you are looking at a grand total of 73.91 (or 62.66 if you are Gold as the base game is currently on sale, and that's all before tax) to get the entire game, and I'm not even sure if that includes the Blood Dragon armor or not.