Battlefield 3 players will, as they found out during the recent alpha test, find servers and join games from the Battlelog website, meaning you'll need to use your browser in order to play Battlefield 3. On top of that, it's been confirmed that no matter where you buy it, BF3 requires you to have Origin in order to play.
The requirement only exists for PC gamers -- those playing on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 will only need an EA account, which isn't much of a hurdle to jump through (and odds are, if you've played an EA game online before, you already have one anyway).
Those PC gamers won't be able to avoid the requirement, either. No matter where you plan on buying the PC game from -- Direct2Drive, GameStop, Best Buy -- you'll need an Origin account to play BF3 whether or not you opted for a physical copy of the game. That's according to DICE's global Battlefield community manager, Daniel Matros, who confirmed the news on Twitter earlier this week.
Origin is the relaunched version of the EA Store that EA has been trying to promote in recent months.
We've known for some time now that Battlefield 3 was missing from Steam and possibly wouldn't do sold through it, despite being the most popular digital games distributor around. EA says Valve is to blame, and BF3 only isn't available because of the restrictive terms of service put in place on Steam, pointing to the fact that BF3 is available through GamersGate, Direct2Drive, Impulse, and so on.
Meanwhile, EA has tried to push Origin as the best place to order from; doing so gets you early beta access and exclusive Battlefield Play4Free items in addition to the other pre-order goodies that are available elsewhere.
The Steam situation is unfortunate. Even if it were selling the game, though, an Origin account would still be required, much to the frustration of those who are perfectly content to rely on an existing service like Steam for all of their PC gaming needs.
It's not the first time a third-party service will be required no matter where the game was purchased; Games for Windows Live titles force users to sign in to a GfWL account in order to play no matter where they bought the game. The Origin account requirement is at least slightly less cumbersome than that, as the Live requirement meant that no one could be signed into Xbox Live with the same account (in other words, one person can't play a PC game while another watches Netflix on an Xbox 360 with that Gamertag).
It is worth noting that, once upon a time, Valve made Half-Life 2 buyers install Steam in order to play. The big difference is that it was a much different time and there wasn't already a fully accepted service (like Steam today) that Valve was ignoring by using Steam.
Regardless of the complaints that will arise as a result of this, Battlefield 3 is a big enough game that, like Diablo III and its always-online requirement, most people won't be dissuaded from purchasing it.
Source: BF3 Blog
pc games list pc games strategy top 10 pc games top xbox games used xbox games
No comments:
Post a Comment