Wing Commander Joining Origin Humble Bundle Soon (April 15, 2015)

[ChrisReid]

Electronic Arts is participating in a new Humble Bundle sale for charity. For those unfamiliar with this event, players can name their price for a set of games that would otherwise retail for $134. They can then determine how to split the proceeds among three designated organizations. New games are normally added to the deal over a two-week period. However, a post on the Korean EA Origin page has leaked out some of the upcoming games. This include classics Wing Commander 3 & 4 as well as Ultima 7 and Sim City 2000. WC3 was already given away on the house last year, but it's very exciting to think about the hundreds of thousands of incoming new owners of the special DVD edition of WC4! Stay tuned and we'll let you know when the WC additions become official.




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Original update published on April 15, 2015

 

[cff]

'Origin' is still 100% DRM, isn't it? So no chance to play without Internet connection or possibility to back up the games?

 

[ChrisReid]

'Origin' is still 100% DRM, isn't it? So no chance to play without Internet connection or possibility to back up the games?

When you buy the WC games via Origin, it downloads the full copies of the game to your hard drive. It's easy to navigate to their folder for backup purposes.

By default, the games launch from within the Origin client, which requires a login. However, all you need to do is drop in a dosbox.exe from dosbox.com to the game's folder and they'll launch offline "DRM free" just fine.

Now that you mention it, the above would apply to all games except WC4 DVD, which is the Windows version of the game. So I don't think DOSBox is the answer there, but in that case, it may not require anything to self launch actually. They haven't really changed the games from their GOG counterparts (omitting Priv Righteous Fire being one notable exception). They just launch them from within the Origin client by default, but the original files are still there.

 

[cff]

What about non-wc games like Mass Effect? Do they need to be activated for each machine or would a backup work?

 

[ChrisReid]

I'm not familiar with the specifics for any other games, but I don't think they activate per machine. One of the benefits of the Origin client login process is that your collection is portable, I believe, as long as you login and download the games to your computer. As for whether they have DRM required, it would depend on the game. I don't think they're actively going back and modifying old games, so anything that wasn't natively designed for Origin can probably be tweaked to get working independently. New EA games like Sim City may require an internet connection (although I think they made an offline version of that as well).