Very, yeah. There are some questions that you'd only know the answer to if you remembered random blurbs of info that NPCs in the world have spouted while others will be VERY difficult to answer if you haven't played the first game. As a whole, I'm going to try to make sure the questions that relate to the first game can be answered by those who didn't play it as long as they do enough research in-game.
There are general knowledge questions as well, like ones relating to world map geography and such.