Recently, Titanfall 2 got an update to allow people to actually play it online again without the experience being immediately and constantly ruined by folks engaged in a years-long DDOS campaign for vague but undeniably very stupid reasons. I'm not one of those dudes that goes on about how we "need" a Titanfall 3, but I was excited seeing that after several years of continuing to sell the game for money, they'd finally made the online component playable without relying on a feature-incomplete third party client. And hey, I already own the game, so why not fire it back up for a bit of nostalgia?
Now here's the thing - I put EA's DRM client, Origin, on my computer to play Titanfall 2. It sucked, but I was willing to put up with this for this specific game. Once I stopped playing Titanfall 2, I forgot about Origin entirely. So I figure to boot it up now I'll just have to launch Origin and do some updates, but it's all still on my computer so it shouldn't be too hard to get back up to speed.
Folks more in the loop than I was already know what's coming here, but if you're like me and immediately forgot about this awful not-Steam the second you no longer had to use it: Origin's dead! They killed it years ago, and replaced it with a different, equally stupid app referred to as "EA Play" except "EA Play" is the name of the subscription service and not the app, which is technically just called "EA" but referred to as "The EA Desktop Client" officially. Trying to launch Origin doesn't have any sort of indication of this, it just tries to update itself, gets confused when it can't phone home, and then refuses to let you log in, insisting that your password is wrong when in reality it can't even check that anymore.
This is annoying - I already have Titanfall 2 installed thru Origin, and it feels like wishful thinking that the EA Play app will gracefully carry that over, and the modern me is less willing to put up with a new layer of sludge just for what is likely to be one night's worth of nostalgia. In desperation I peek at the price on Steam and it's currently $3 presumably just to entrap people like me in this exact situation, and I immediately decide that's fair play and give them $3 to avoid this hassle and stick with the devil I've known. You win, jerks!
It takes it sweet time downloading, unpacking, 90gb almost seems modest for a game with this many capital-G Graphics, but it is a bit older these days so I don't really think twice. Gonna have to go clear out the old install, but Windows will help there. Except when I launch it... I'm greeted with the fucking EA Play app, launched from Steam, asking for a separate login before I can play this god damn robot game. It's a small comfort that before I realized Origin was dead I actually did reset my password for this account, so it's quite easy to log in, but that starts a mandatory task where the EA Play app claims to be uninstalling Origin, except it's still very much on my computer so they can't even clean up after themselves anymore.
It does at least see that Titanfall 2 is installed, although I have no idea if this is the Origin install or the Steam install, because I just had to download and install 90GB of something and I simply refuse to accept that was all for the EA app that I'm currently using. I launch it and it's definitely slow and clunky enough that it feels like a first-time boot, but when it finally loads up my account is there... only it's been converted into an unintelligible gibberish of letters and numbers. Apparently they just did this to all Origin accounts during the transition, and it can't be fixed through the client, only a web browser. My buddy tries to invite me and I get a pop-up that says "You've received an invite to play TITANFALL 2 DELUXE EDITION. Click here to begin installing!" and I briefly start seeing red.
The Titanfall 2 devs - who I am referring to as such and not as Respawn because I don't believe anyone who worked on this game is still present at that studio - were canny enough to include a workaround for this, mercifully. Despite the game being fully platform-locked, and every platform having its own friend list and invite features, Titanfall 2 has its own ad-hoc clan network that allows you to gather and invite players, and because we set one up way back in the day when this game worked normally, that was still a valid avenue for him to find my mangled account name and party up with it.
When it was all said and done, I got to play 3 rounds of Attrition. That's one round per dollar, based on what I paid on Steam for it. I am equal parts delighted that Titanfall 2 is still that much fun, and shocked that we've made playing it suck this much. I don't know how to respond to my digital store front/library manager opening a second, bespoke digital storefront/library manager other than to shake my head and mumble "what the fuck are we even doing here, man"