Sunday, August 12, 2012

Origin vs Steam

A few days ago, I finally bought Mass Effect 3. I had played Mass Effect 1 & 2 before so I intend to finish the trilogy. I saw the game on sale, bought it, went home, installed it…and my god was it a bitch to install!

When I first pop the disc in my PC, it told me I need an “Origin” account to download and to play the game. Now I’m not one of those guys with a problem on this. I have a “Steam” account and play Skyrim, Fallout 3, Majesty etc, via Steam with no problem whatsoever.

However I do have a lot of problems with Origin.

When I first tried to install Mass Effect 3, I had to create an “Origin” account. No problem; I did that for “Steam” as well so I expected that. However after creating the account, the installation failed. I thought maybe I need to wait for a verification email from EA and Bioware, so I went into my email but there was nothing there. I waited for awhile but there was still nothing.

I went back to the installation and redo everything again. Still no luck! I called a friend who had an “Origin” account on the matter to see if I was doing anything wrong. He couldn’t help much as he don’t play the Mass Effect games and have problems with “Origin” as well. I went online and after a long search (there’s a lot of problems with “Origin”) finally got an idea of what the problem is.

Following the recommendation on a forum, I went and created an account first with “Origin”. Then I installed Mass Effect 3 and just tag the game to my account. It seems that when you try to install Mass Effect 3, you “might” face a problem if you have to create an “Origin” account at the same time. The forum recommends that I create an account via the “Origin” website first, then install the game. It worked.

Let me put it simply so that there’s no mistake of my feelings on this; the installation process of Mass Effect 3 is flat-out nonsensical!

It took me about 40mins to finally start to install the game in my PC but more importantly, if you are going to make me create an “Origin” account to download and play your game; for god sake please make it possible for me to create an account! Why the hell must I create an account separately first? That’s just plain stupid!

I mean the game was created by EA and Bioware. “Origin” was created and run by EA. How could the integration between “Origin” and Mass Effect 3 be so bad that I can’t even create an “Origin” account during the installation process of the game? That’s completely insane.

I had read that EA wanted “Origin” to one day match “Steam”. From my first experience with “Origin”, I’ll tell them to just forget it. “Steam” is good, “Origin” is terrible. It’s not even close.

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