The Origin launcher is a blight upon the galaxy. Period. It just sucks. Unfortunately the company making it and forcing it on people happens to be the publisher of some of my favorite game franchises, namely all of the current Star Wars games, Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I’m not willing to refrain from playing any of them because of ideological reasons.
An added difficulty is that Origin doesn’t play too nicely with Linux. I have difficulty entering my passwords and having them recognized properly, it’s fairly slow to load, it starts multiple Origin instances of processes when I start a game for some reason and it tries to force yet another overlay on me that results in stutter, window minimization and sometimes even crashes. I’m not a fan of overlays in general, they break my immersion, but Steam lets me disable theirs easily enough at least.
In principle, the Origin overlay can be disabled from within the application but if you run an EA game via Steam that’s not possible as this option is not exposed to the end user.
Luckily, there’s a fix for this:
- Locate the folder holding the Wine prefix of your game. If you’re running
Steam natively, this is in
$HOME/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/[Game ID]/pfx. The Game ID can be determined in various ways, e.g. by looking it up here. - Delete or rename the following file:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Origin\igo64.dllwhich is located within the prefix of the game.
Done. Unfortunately, you have to repeat this process for every game but since this is Linux you can also just write a script to automate this.
Happy, Origin-overlay-free gaming!