EA recently released a new set of games on STEAM this past week, including Mass Effect, Battlefield, and the Star Wars Battlefront series. It has now come to our notice that a lot of Mass Effect 3 players are currently facing performance issues with the STEAM version of this game, as evident from this forum thread.
EA’s “Origin in-game overlay” seems to be the culprit here. The Steam version of Mass Effect 3 game has reportedly been suffering from performance issues, and the exact root cause has been narrowed down by gamers to the Origin overlay which actually remains permanently enabled in the background. These issues are yet to be addressed though.
Many PC gamers are suffering from significant gameplay performance issues. And the worst part is that Steam users cannot disable this feature due to the background ‘intrusive’ nature of EA’s Origin overlay. Mass Effect 3 should run easily on most of the modern PC systems, but gamers are unable to enjoy a smooth gaming experience due to framerate spikes, FPS drops and stuttering/lag.
Surprisingly, even if you disable the Origin overlay from the Origin settings, Mass Effect 3 will automatically enable the Origin overlay in the background on Steam, resulting in poor overall performance.
Before some gamers have noted that Mass Effect 3 had performance issues even on the Origin overlay. But when they disabled the overlay all the stutters and lag disappeared. However, this same solution does not seem to work on the STEAM version, since the steam client forces and enables the Origin overlay regardless.
EA told some of the Steam users that this is a Steam issue, but when the exact same problem already existed before on the Origin overlay, we find it hard to believe how can the STEAM client be at fault here.
As of now, Mass Effect 3’s Steam version has mixed reviews.
Stay tuned for an update.
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So origin client is indeed a DRM of some sort ? This pretty much sucks if this is happening with EA games on steam.
This has been known for awhile now.
Not sure why downvoted, Steam is literally DRM. That’s why it exists. It was a new DRM that wasn’t intrusive garbage like SecuROM back in the day. For 17 years this has been known. Obviously Origin is DRM.
Kinda sorta. Steam offers their DRM to Publishers if they want it but it’s not mandatory. There are some games on Steam that don’t use it at all. Mostly older games. You will find the exe in the folder and I have tried to launch the game without being online or going into offline mode and they launch just fine. Some games will try to connect to Steam and if they can’t they give you the option to launch in offline mode. Most require a connection to Steam or that you be in offline mode or they won’t launch at all.
I detested Steam for several years when it first came out but it doesn’t bother me for a long, long time now but I have a reliable internet connection.
All Store Fronts (except for GoG and possibly Bethesds and even EPIC I believe) work as DRM.
Mass effect 3 was really really good before last 10 minutes. Dam i miss this series.
Weird i played the game when it released on a crappy pc, apart fps not being high i dont remember experiencing stutter or framerates spikes
We got used to have these clients running on the bcakground, but running client over client is never gonna be good.
The first thing I did when I saw EA back on Steam again was to to put them on my ignore list.
No, it isn’t. I installed it just now to test and it runs perfectly as fine as it did the day it came out, actually better with 7 years newer tech. It didn’t have issues when it was new, either.
Other than the part where you have to separately install all your DLC on Origin the first time you launch it because it doesn’t know what DLC you own through Origin because this whole thing is half baked garbage thanks to EA’s greed.
The fact that you still have to “connect to EA servers” for a 7 year old game is absurd, too.