DRM Woes: We're Sorry, An Error Has Occurred
To be honest, I'm not sure if this is a DRM issue or just a bug with Origin and Dragon Age Inquisition, either way it nearly drove me crazy. Having downloaded the twenty-five something gigabyte game I was excited to begin testing. Things were looking good, the game had a solid built-in benchmark that reflected in-game performance.
To start off with a reference point from each camp we began testing with the R9 290X and the GTX 780 Ti. Both runs went well and continued going well until our 9th GPU into testing. Doing exactly as we had done with success many times prior, we clicked on Dragon Age: Inquisition's shortcut which opened up Origin and then the game.
However, this time we received an error message...
"We're sorry, an error has occurred"
"We are unable to connect to EA servers to activate Dragon Age Inquisition Digital Deluxe on this computer using your account. Please try again later."
Thinking there must have been something wrong with either the network or Internet connection, I investigated. Both were fine and after seeing that other Origin games such as Titanfall were working, I assumed something was wrong with the Dragon Age servers.
While I was waiting for that issue to work itself out, I decided to load a copy of the game onto my work PC. To my surprise, it worked.
Figuring the servers were up again, I moved back to the test system but received the same error. I check my office PC again and the game was still working, so clearly there was no server issue.
In my attempts to resume testing I tried a repair on the game, completely reinstalling the game, and completely reinstalling Origin. Alas, I still received the same error.Since Dragon Age was still working on my office PC I decided to clone the SSD then and throw the cloned version into my test system. That also failed... yet I was still able to connect on my office PC.
I wasted countless more hours trying various remedies to no avail and concluded that it was a hardware issue, so I built a completely new test system using a different platform, installed the test system drive and Dragon Age: Inquisition greeted me with same error.
After nearly losing it, I took the SSD out of my office PC, where Dragon Age has been functional all along, and stuck it in a test system. Naturally, I received the same error so I placed the SSD back in my office PC. This broke my game entirely and now all my computers were failing to connect.
Having only tested eight GPUs and then wasting a little over 24 hours, I gave up and walked away. Hours later EA delivered another key so I booted up the test system with the intention of creating a new Origin account.
Before I did that I tried executing Dragon Age one last time and to my amazement the game loaded perfectly – I nearly fell off my chair. I ran some tests quickly and then shut down to try another GPU.
Four GPU changes later, the same error taunted me. I was back in business after an hour for another two GPU tests before being locked out again. This carried on for three days of benching. DRM fail would be a nice way to put it.