Of course this is from Origin, and I don’t use Origin at all, so I cannot tell anyone how to navigate the program/site. Just saw this and thought to share.
Grab your free game here:
https://www.origin.com/usa/en-us/store/free-games/on-the-house
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yaiks, another repeat 
small note, some regions (at least france i think) might be getting another game instead, on their Origin “on the house” store page, Medal of Honor Pacific Assault i think
(might also be worth mentioning you can also get those "region “exclusive” on the house"games too, if you use a vpn etc. and log in and claim the game via their site)
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Hmm… That’s an interesting thought, I clearly haven’t speculated the free-game market enough these days…
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last i checked/did this, origin doesn’t have the same strict “account-linked-geo restriction” like say steam does (while Origin “ties” your client to a geo location, it doesn’t forcibly tie your actual account to that same geo location, like steam does, so can log in on website from other “location” and interact on there just fine, as if from that location)
so i’ve done the vpn thing to claim the “on the house” freebies myself in the past when they were different across regions (which just seem like a mighty stupid thing to do in the first place, but EA, -so stupid makes sense i guess)
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If it works, why not? I am probably going to sign up for an Origin account one of these days when they are offering a free game that I really want to play, I suppose, for now, I will just keep my eyes peeled for the deals they have.
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all their past offerings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Origin’s_On_the_House_games
might give a sense if will be worth it “someday”
also, don’t forget they do also have that “access” thingy
sorta like their version of Playstation now/Xbox game pass, where you subscribe/“rent” their games for a monthly fee, -tho here it’s ofc “mostly” EA titles (and more limited amount than Ps/Xb), for like 5bucks i think
but still serves some fairly well that don’t want to “buy”, in the sense when you have a long break, you can just sign 1 month, and play “all” the games (from the catalogue/list) as much as you want, and then cancel when done/don’t want to “rent” anymore/bored of their games
(tho ofc doing it “too much”, and eventually you’d likely just have been able to have bought a bunch of the games outright for what might amount to 5 bucks each anyway)
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@Gnuffi I had Origin Access last year, though I’m considering dropping it as the only new additions to their library in recent times use Denuvo (their last two games were Mass Effect Andromeda and Battlefield 1). It’s fantastic if you don’t care about that, though.
I played a bit of Dragon Age 1-2 and let someone else use my account for Inquisition, I played through Dead Space 1-3 once more, I finished the entire Mass Effect trilogy and played enough of Andromeda to know that I hated it, I played through Crysis 1 for as long as it could hold together and blazed through Crysis 2 (still never got to finishing 3 though 
), and found Orwell, an absolutely fantastic episodic political thriller written by people who actually know HOW to write. That wasn’t too bad for $30, and it doesn’t even include Titanfall or Mirror’s Edge.
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I had Origin Access in January to play Mass Effect Andromeda. I was not impressed, in fact, it actually annoyed me to the point where I just uninstalled it again after about a week of play.
My PC isn’t exactly top of the range, so I had to run in low to medium settings, which I can put up with but the game itself was just so tedious. I had Dragon Age Inquisition on the PS3 and still never bothered with finishing that one either.
It is either Bioware games and their now very dry, VERY stilted dialogue conversations or I just do not have the patience I once had for their games but I am awesome, so it can’t be that.
Mass Effect 1,2 and 3 (for the most part) were fantastic games, I loved Dragon Age but hated DA2. As for Andromeda, WTH were they even doing? It was just soooooooo boring.
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their price makes it very competitive, even if the library is small by comparison
not many places could you get a months worth of full time renting “a game”, for 5$.
(hell i think blockbuster used to charge more, and even then you’d only have a game a fraction of the time)
so for some games/periods it certainly can be a good offer to some people, (same with the consoles’ subs version)
see a bunch of games you haven’t played?, curious about?, but maybe unwilling to actually put the “full” down payment for? here you go, all you can eat, for a month should be enough time during a vacation period, or “off season”, to either try a bunch, or even play several larger games fully to completion
which then would be a decent deal for a handful of pocket change
the only “issue” i’d see arise, is if you do it “enough times”, with a small library like EA, you end up, depending on how many games you managed to play, to pay as much as you would have buying a bunch of the games outright on sales anyway
so while titanfall 2 on it’s own might be more expensive than a months worth of renting, after 10months, you could have bought like 5 games or more, since “a lot” of them eventually gets discounted to 5bucks each anyway, or lower… 
i considered it myself to get a go at inquisitions, (i have a bunch of the other games), but stuff came up, so thought i’d just get around to it later… or buy it when got to 5bucks,
-and then it became “wait for GOTY to get on sale” 
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I had an R7 360, and it really hurts to look at Frostbite games in low settings. Unlike Unreal Engine, where you might see a bit of microstutter or some texture streaming for a second, Frostbite drops several of its settings to the absolute lowest instead. It’s the game that motivated me to finally open up my computer and test out the one I thought I broke-- my R9 280 fired up, and I’ve been using it ever since. The game is beautiful, from a visual standpoint… but there’s three sides to Andromeda… gameplay, technical work, and story.
Game Design
The gameplay is something I can definitely praise. I love the new Mako, the new combat mechanics feel smooth and streamlined while bringing back RPG progression mechanics as old as Mass Effect 1, and they basically made all the old features work. It’s the perfect backing for a modern Mass Effect game. The open world had some good ideas, and could have worked well provided they had good content. The mechanics behind survival also work quite well, and adds a sort of underlying long-term goal to the game that SHOULD be there.
Programming
The technical side… there were issues, no doubt. Most of that was due to a rough launch, no doubt, but when it comes together, it looks amazing. The facial animations and details are fantastic (we’ll get to that), the texturework is some of the best I’ve ever seen, and the game definitely looks the part. Its environments also had so much fine detail in them. It’s just generally a visually pleasing game.
Writing ʰᵉʳᵉ ʷᵉ ᴳᴼᴼᴼᴼᴼᴼ
The game’s single shortcoming, and the thing that tears apart everything it did right, is the writing and acting. It has some baffling VA picks that don’t match characters at all (the Krogan especially made me burst out in sad hide-the-pain laughter), and… well… “my face is tired.” The writing is terrible. Some of the acting is just dreadful. The characters are almost all unlikeable. The accents are forced and terrible. The character MODELS look terrible. Everything that was hand-crafted, everything that was made to accommodate the writers’ vision of the universe is a pile of amateur dog-turds that should have been ejected into the cold depths of space long before arriving in the galaxy. Go ahead and watch those infamous cutscenes with a custom character, and check out how much better they look with a more realistic looking model. I’m sadly forced to accept the fact that the furious redditors were right; somebody edited the models that were based on real actors to look less “good,” and it gives the impression that they didn’t know the first thing about 3D artwork. When you have random forum-er’s fixing your models in Photoshop within the first 30 minutes, you’ve really eff’d up.
So, the intergalactic trip to the uncanny valley was a massive waste of everyone’s time. It’s a shame, because there’s some real talent behind the game. In the end, though, it’s brought down by writing about as subtle as BioWare’s lead designer:
Oof. That’s quite the textwall there, and I really started venting into some topics I really don’t want to get into without any real explanation. Essentially, I don’t have a problem with beliefs or political views, but it’s like anything; moderation and subtlety are key. You can cleverly add anti-war themes to a game through great writing that subverts expectations (Spec Ops: The Line), or you can have a flaming whale take down a helicopter to show why child soldiers are wrong (MGSV). Mass Effect Andromeda leans towards the latter, but without any of the spectacle. The beautiful environments, the revamped gameplay, the amazing setting of being stranded in a foreign galaxy without any clue of how the events of ME3 played out, and being totally alone in a FULLY alien universe… it’s all engaging, brilliant stuff, but it all went to waste with a story about some of the worst BioWare companions we’ve ever had, with writing that has no idea where it wants to go.
EDIT: Made my textwall more tolerable through the awesome formatting tools on Chrono.
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Nah mate, I get ya. I agree with most, if not all of that and yes, I know very well who that guy is. the less said about him the better I think.
I had no issues with the look and feel of the game, what I despised were the boring characters and stilted dialogue. I just did not care. In Mass Effect 1, 2 and 3, I cared what happened with most of my crew with little to no excpetions, I replayed the games from the start to see those I killed in the first game progress into the next to see what I hadn’t previously seen, I even delved into the ME3 Multiplayer Horde Mode that no one seemed to like but I enjoyed it for what it was, but Mass Effect Andromeda was really quite something and of course I was well aware of the aforementioned douchebag at Bioware’s political views and he is free to have them, if that is his desire but when you know the game is going to revolve around someone like that’s work, I couldn’t shake the feeling that those characters would exist solely for the wrong reasons but I didn’t judge it for that, I judged the game (of which I played) by its own merits and frankly the dialogue was the thing that I just couldn’t get past, it felt like it was written by some amateur kid on the bus while running late for work on his first day and they said, yep good enough because it feels like they judged it by who wrote it, not by what was written. The characters were just simply awful with poor actors doing poor work.
At least we got the memes though, right?
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I'm not saying the old trilogy is perfect or anything,
but you can definitely see how bad the model is on its own merits, LONG before facial animation is thrown into the mix. You can’t make that ugliness smile. It genuinely looks like a rejected Terminator.
You missed a few, by the way.
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I love this thread.
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Is it really hijacked though? We’re just showcasing all the dankness packed into Origin Access, which is tangentially related to Origin On The House by virtue of being on that client nobody wants to admit that they use.
Oh, and I suppose while we’re at it, I can’t forgive the programmers for this one:
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It’s all good, I really don’t mind it at all… LOL!
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