Mass Effect 3 is one of the biggest games EA will release this year, so the company, together with the title’s developer, BioWare, want to clear everything up concerning its upcoming launch.

Speaking on the game’s website, BioWare Community Coordinator Chris Priestly now talked about Mass Effect 3 on the PC, confirming that the game won’t appear on Valve’s Steam, relying instead just on EA’s Origin and a number of third party retailers.

“During initial release Mass Effect 3 will be available on Origin and a number of other 3rd party digital retailers, but not on Steam at this time. Steam has adopted a set of restrictive terms of service which limit how developers interact with customers to deliver patches and other downloadable content. We are intent on providing Mass Effect to players with the best possible experience no matter where they purchase or play their game, and are happy to partner with any download service that does not restrict our ability to connect directly with our consumers.”

Those that buy the game in retail stores won’t be able to escape Origin, as the Mass Effect 3 requires a one-time activation, not to mention an online connection to Origin servers for the cooperative Galaxy at War multiplayer mode.

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Star Wars: The Old Republic was eagerly awaited by a huge number of BioWare as well as Star Wars fans from all around the world. After plenty of teases, screenshots or videos, the game finally went online on December 20.

Now, after plenty of players finally got a chance to experience the final build of the game, it seems that quite a few bugs and issues were encountered by some of them. As such, the studio has just released the first patch for The Old Republic, in the form of update 1.0.1.

Quite a lot of problems will be fixed, according to BioWare, including performance issues on planets like Taris, missions that wouldn’t trigger properly or didn’t offer the right rewards, not to mention bugs that appeared in some Flashpoint or Operation content.

Check out all the fixes included in Star Wars: The Old Republic patch 1.0.1 below.

Classes and Combat
Combat Bug Fixes
Fixed a bug that could cause the global cooldown to display incorrectly in the UI.
Abilities that require Companion Characters now always correctly require a companion.
NPCs no longer attempt to engage vanity pets in combat.

Imperial Agent
Operative
The tooltip for Acid Blade now displays the correct information.

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