PC Game Pass, now includes EA Play! [PCGP, XGP:PC]

@Silent_Buddha try playing one of their smaller games like Unraveled or FE or Sea of Solitude to see if it's horrible all around or only especially bad for the games released in 2011 (BF 3).

Too many good games coming to Game Pass in the next couple months for me to bother trying to install and play another EA game. I'll probably revisit this and try a newer EA game at some point. I just started with BF3 because I think that was the first game in the BF series that I couldn't play due to EA moving away from Steam.

I'm hoping that newer games like Titan Fall 2 won't be such a shit show as BF3 was.

I'm almost tempted to go look for an "unprotected" version of BF3 just to be able to play it. But I don't think I'm going to let EA drive me to the dark side of gaming. :p

Regards,
SB
 
Too many good games coming to Game Pass in the next couple months for me to bother trying to install and play another EA game.

But those are pretty good smaller games. Then again I played them on console. I'm curious how the PC experience is.
 
So, for the first time in almost 10 years (basically when EA stopped releasing their games on Steam) I finally decided to try playing an EA game on PC again.

Installed EA Play. OK, sucks to have another launcher but whatever, the games in it are included in Game Pass.

Decided to start with Battlefield 3. Installed just fine. And here is when the shitshow starts.

First off. Origin sucks ass, there's just no two ways around it.

First, why is the game even opening a browser window/tab in order to launch the game when I have to start the EA launcher in order to start the freaking game in the first place? Why is a browser even needed?

Second, it launches the game minimized. I didn't even know the game was running, I'm sitting here waiting for minutes wondering why the game hasn't started. Try to launch it multiple times from the browser before I notice that it's running in my taskbar. Great.

OK, click on the taskbar icon and bring the game up. Long unskippable intro made worse by the fact that the mouse appears to be disabled while the intro screens and crap plays. I started to think it froze my computer, but I could alt-tab out just fine which made me wonder if the game was frozen. Luckily I decided to wait rather than doing an end task on the game.

OK, menu finally comes up. It's in 1080 centered with huge black borders before it scales it up to my monitors native res. Not a great experience so far.

The best for last. I can't adjust video settings. Click on Video menu ... crash. Reboot computer for a fresh boot environment, start up the game. Click on Video settings menu ... crash.

Do a cursory search in the net and it appears it might be related to having an HDMI display. The workaround was to disconnect the HDMI display. All of my displays use HDMI... Uh, WTF DICE? That might not be the actual reason, but holy shit why is this even happening in the first place? I've never had a game crash by going into the game's graphics options.

Holy shit, I was not missing out on anything by not playing EA games for almost a decade it seems.

Man, if I didn't want to use Origin before, this certainly has made it so that I would never ever consider buying a game on Origin ... ever. Up until now the EG Store was by far the worst storefront on PC. Having now tried EA's storefront, I think it's safe to say that Origin somehow manages to be even worse than EGS. Surprising since I had thought it impossible for any storefront to be worse than EGS. :p

I'm now wondering if I want to even try installing anything else from EA Play or if it's all as crappy as Battlefield 3.

Regards,
SB
I used to talk to a guy at a Discord server who works for EA, and they consider the EA Desktop (Origin) app team to be the worst thing in the company.

That being said, Back 4 Blood and Destiny 2 added to gamepass PC.

Back 4 Blood stumbles onto Game Pass today, while Destiny: Beyond Light shines on PC - TheXboxHub
 
I have StarWars Squadrons on Origin, when I run it it launches steam (maybe because the game uses steam vr) and then it launches the game
Edit its worse, when I run it it launches Epic Store and then steam (maybe because the game uses steam vr) and then it launches the game so 3 launchers for the game
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It even worse when you have origin and EA desktop installed

some games requires origin instead of EA desktop. But origin (or ea desktop?) refuse to run along each other
 
Interesting, MS is now allowing "early access" games onto Game Pass. Everspace 2 is still in Early Access. MS denotes this by calling it a "Game Preview".

Not a bad thing as long as MS continues to curate what they allow on. For example, Everspace 2 Early Access is very positive (91% positive) with it's lifetime review graph showing very few negative reviews outside of the initial launch.

It's a really good game. More of a space flight shooter than a space flight simulation.

Regards,
SB
 
"Game preview" isn't really new there were other games like Second Extinction, ATLAS and others, dunno if PUBG was in early access when it came to Gamepass.
 
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I don't know if PUBG was in the preview program, but Grounded and the recent Gamepass release of Craftopia are in preview.
 
New xbox app feature on pc that is in testing. you can now change the folder for game installs . Every compatible title will go into a folder picked by the player. You can also now mod the title installed. Some titles are ready to migrate so you can use the new features with them
 
I'm pleasantly surprised, though it does reopen the can of worms of the fact they have no proper sandbox for win32 applications, when untrusted executable mods could really use one. The shared sandbox for all win32 apps they were planning for windows x and the zero persistence sandbox they have now are almost useless.

PS. compatible games sound somwhat scary though, will devs have to suck microsoft off for it like the privilege of installing in modifiable windowsapps or can any dev set the flag without extra permission from Microsoft?
 
the pc gamepass app is improving every day. The best thing about gamepass is, imho, that you know your friends and you have the same games. :yes: This also includes EA Play.

Yesterday, my best friend IRL and I purchased each one our own copy of Battlefield 2042 on a EA sale, and since we are on EA Play 'cos of PC Gamepass, we had an extra 10% discount, so we paid 26,99€ for a brand new Battlefield.
 
Flight sim is in the cloud :p
that game is a hardware killer. It's the ideal game to run in the cloud. I am not a fan at all of cloud gaming, but in this case where the framerate or responsiveness nor image artefacts aren't that important for the gameplay experience, it's one of the very few games where the cloud offer a benefit. I am not keen on seeing how the temps reach higher and higher values.
 
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