EA: No Patches for Battlefield 3 Outside Origin
EA and DICE are standing firm on their decision to keep Battlefield patches within the Origin platform.
Here's a bit of bad news for PC gamers who purchased Battlefield 3 outside EA's Origin digital platform: you won't (officially) get patches anywhere else, nor will there be standalone versions. Ever.
Both EA and DICE confirmed this fact on Friday in an email exchange with Ausgamers. As the site points out, the most recent patch weighs a hefty 3.6 GB. Because of this, Australian players on limited download plans have requested that EA release standalone files that can be downloaded from local ISPs instead of abroad.
"Many Australians have had issues downloading the huge volumes of content relating to Battlefield 3," the site reports. "The recent release of a 3.5 GB patch was another reminder that, for those of us on limited download plans, keeping games up to date is a bit of a hassle when your ISP isn't able to mirror them locally."
But apparently EA is sticking to its guns and will only update the popular military shooter through Origin. The company hasn't made this fact any kind of secret, indicating for some time now that it wants to keep updates and content packs within the EA ecosystem -- presumably for piracy reasons. This exclusive factor was part of the controversy surrounding the disappearance of EA games on Valve Software's Steam platform.
Still, EA and DICE may eventually change their minds if the multiplayer component begins to diminish in traffic because gamers are unable to download and install patches -- especially when they range in the gigabytes. Fans are encouraged to visit the official game forum and vent their thoughts if patching is a major problem.
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I don't understand the problem here...
Even if they provide a standalone patch, Australian players still need to download the patches onto the PC using their capped usuage.
Battlefield 3 would sell many more copies if they allowed it to be sold without origin, and allowed it to be sold on steam as well as other platforms.
If all companies decide to make there own digital distribution platform and all have exclusive games on there platform, I will have to have about 5 (EA, Valve, Activision, UBIsoft, etc) programs running at once to have access to all my games
One read of the Origin EULA was enough for me (and friends) to not buy BF3, despite really wanting to play it. It's (nearly) enough to actually force me to piracy just to play the offline single player.
If EA would simply relent and allow it to be published on Steam then they would sell a lot more copies.
i simply wont buy battlefield then
played through single player on stepdads ps3, simply wont buy
I have been waiting to buy when it is available without Origin...
is maybe the game I want the most right now...
...but not with that.
@may1
Quote "Even if they provide a standalone patch, Australian players still need to download the patches onto the PC using their capped usage."
If you need to reinstall, then you know why people want offline updates, download once, use many or until the patch has been superseded.
One big problem with this is when the installation fails to be patched as it was with a great many users this past week. I myself found that the installation of the patch through original balked, got confused and then stopped me playing the game in it's un-patched state either on or offline.
I eventually managed to fix the problem but only by completely removing the software from the machine and reinstalling it which meant waiting for all the other previous patches to get applied too.
EA\Origin state that post 'clean installation' the game will be updated with a cumulative set of files in a sort of differential update but in my experience that wasn't true as I saw an amount of data download through origin (my initial installation is performed via retail DVD) the equivalent to both the older patches and the latest one combined.
As for the supposed repair option in the Origin client that failed to work also whereby my even moving all the installation files out of their folder elsewhere for testing and running the repair returned a status report that the game was up to date an ready to run without having replaced them in any way!
Sorry EA but you really screwed up with using this 'Origin thing', hell, the app even still says 'BETA' in it's title bar as if we didn't already realise they are using their paying customers as testers.
Not only does the game have some major flaws so does actually getting it to run at times such as the dreaded 'You have been disconnected from EA' message which apparently even EA don't know where that message comes from within the Origin client (don't they have the code to be able to look it up?).
Anyhow, warts and all it's still a better game than the MW\COD types. I just wish they hadn't bothered with the pointless browser-based lobby system for launching the game and the whole origin thing for control and securitation and patching.
They could have left it like the BFBC2 that would have been too easy and undoubtedly would have worked too well so being EA they just had to change it.