The Mass Effect franchise coming to Steam was simply too good to be true; we all celebrated as multiple titles were finally all brought under one roof as the trilogy was united once again on the PC platform of Steam. Everything was good until players tried to dive into those games.
Battlefield was packaged with the wrong PunkBuster version meaning thousands of players were kicked out time and again until they somehow deduced (or read an article) that they needed to visit PB’s archaic site and download a new package that would allow them to play.
This isn’t the end of it, however; Steam users have been visiting Electronic Art’s help section asking about massive frame drops occurring at all stages during a Steam playthrough of Mass Effect 3. An EA representative stated that, since the title works on Origin flawlessly, yet not Steam, then the problem lies with Steam to come up with a solution.
The issue appears to lie within the thin Origin client that constantly runs in the background; even attempting to run the title without the Origin wrapper results in Origin booting the wrapper in tandem with the title; there is currently no fix that has been found, and both companies are pointing at the other stating that the fault lies with them.
This isn’t the first time that Origin’s platform has caused issues, either; Dragon Age: Inquisition would take exponentially longer to load scenes if you had disabled Origin in-game.
It’s a shame too, as Mass Effect 3 is the final chapter of the trilogy that is widely accepted by fans of the genre, after the buggy mess that was Mass Effect Andromeda resulted in the series turning into a meme-generator with broken animations and abhorrent story walking in tandem towards obsolescence.
Fans are requesting for Electronic Arts to simply remove the Origin wrapper entirely, as it is resulting in more issues than it is possibly solving.
An EA representative stepped into the thread momentarily to request dxdiag files from players that are experiencing massive drops; a move that is puzzling, as the drops all point to the Origin wrapper itself rather than drivers or hardware compatibility.
Mass Effect 3 currently sits on Steam with mixed reviews, with 47% recommending the title to others; the majority of recommendations have less than half an hour of play time, while the vast majority of negative reviews have over an hour. It’s worth noting that Mass Effect 3 had constant issues with frame rate on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 when it launched.
Electronic Arts, if they have sight on the problem as it stands, is likely hoping they can Deux ex the entire problem precisely how they did with the ending. Unfortunately, that left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth the last time they tried it, and it likely won’t fare better here.
