Battlefield 3 has already had its Origins requirement hacked, once again proving that trying to stop piracy by making you play online is a losing proposition for game makers.
As reported by Gamasutra, Razor1911 found a way to play Battlefield 3 without needing an Origin login. This means that any number of pirates can now get this game through torrents or other means.
This is just the latest blow to Electronic Arts in their slipping battle to control Battlefield 3. They had previously been banning some accounts which were playing on hacked servers during the Beta. This meant that for joining one of those you could lose your entire EA account.
As one of the biggest games of the year, it has had no small part of controversy. Electronic Arts and Valve have been negotiating for some time on whether this game will end up on Steam. There is an ample amount of evidence that Battlefield 3 will be on Steam, considering it is on the Steam distributed Punkbuster file. For some reason both companies are keeping this low-key, even though the media already knows.
The game is also has some serious glitches, noted by everyone from IGN to individual Youtube posters. This seems to be normal for a major release these days.
The modding community is also up in arms over Battlefield 3, and several sites have run petitions to have Electronic Arts release the development kit. Currently there aren’t even any modding tools available for fans. This is part of the current EA policy of not allowing mods in order to create DLC. In their philosophy, every free mod is a piece of DLC that they can no longer sell to the consumer.
DLC (Downloadable Content) will also be an integral part of the game. First day DLC is the new business model of EA games, so it should come as no surprise. Some fans are annoyed by this but it is unavoidable as long as modding tools are not allowed.
As anyone in the gaming community knows, this probably won’t last forever. There is someone out there with enough time on their hands to actually make the modding tools needed. Although altering the code itself is also quite illegal. How will EA react to this? It will be interesting to see.
