Probably for the best, not only is it not a good game but it looks noticeably worse then Battlefield 4 for some reason.

You give them free advertising and they give you the finger - nice. 🙄

Glad I skipped this one.

If Only Cities Skyline has graphic benchmark worthy quality 🙂 plus i know you like City building Hilbert.. 😉

As if Origin was not enough, now we have to deal with another piece of DRM on the same game..... EA has so little respect for their costumers.

Should be the same with Lords of the Fallen and Dragon Age: Inquisition and any other game that is using Denuvo, pretty sure Star-Force, Tages and SecuROM also had hardware ID checks too albeit not as intrusive. Denuvo seems to be a pretty light DRM but it is pretty invasive too or how it's called but it does work as it takes up to several months before the games are properly cracked, partially because there's so many different system configurations although as Hilbert discovered if you do upgrade your PC components often this error will pop up after a while. (Should just need to mail support and reset the existing activations, Star-Force and SecuROM had methods so the end user could do this himself but I don't think Denuvo has anything like that which is unfortunate as customer support for big corporations like EA, Valve or Ubisoft can be pretty slow.)

yikes.... you know a company screwed up bad when Hilbert gets this mad. EA deserves it though - I avoid games from them as much as possible. If I see a game where I'm like "oh that looks cool" and see EA attached to it, I won't buy it. I just really wish EA would stop buying smaller companies and destroying their IP. DICE is extremely vulnerable right now.

Its like they want this game to fail so they can have an excuse to can visceral, they might as well let people hack this game, not like you're gona have much fun driving round in a circle for hours on end.

First I was chuckling because I think this is another valid reason to give a sh*t about Hardline. But then it makes you wonder if this is only the first of the titles to come that are crippled this way. To be honest, I guess mostly reviewers get screwed by this, as I won't see myself trying out more than two GPUs until I am fed up with such a game. That doesn't change much about it being unnecessary though, as well as working against the customer, not the real problems those games have. Also, it shows they put more effort in locking down a customer's freedom (what if I want to buy a new GPU every two months and I can afford it?) than into fixing the bugs in their games.

There has to be a way to contact them to get a new activation, As Deep silver did something similar for Two worlds1/2. Where you after you changed hardware including Oses you could get a new activation code by phoning in,email or thru there internet activation. If EA doesn't have a way to do it then this protection is overdoing it and needs to patch it with a different kind of protection if there are so keen on trying to protect their games from pirates but it might as well not be there at all,If pirates wanna play something for nothing, there gonna do it anyway and get around protections to do it.Only way to stop them if you kick their door down and bash their computers with a sledge hammer and them as well. If its there to combat cheater then they need to do it another way.If it there to try to stop pirates then it isn't gonna work any way other then slowing them down.They should give reviewers a special key that works across muiti computer setups that different then retail keys. So hardware reviewers can use the games for benchmarks and reviews. It always the cheaters and the pirates that ruin a good thing for every one else. If it wasn't for them we still be either going thru manuals and looking for a word to play the game,CD serial's or no protection at all. I have no interest in battlefield hardline any way as it just another game like ET quake wars, battlefield etc type of game and i have too many of those type of shooter style games any way. Tho game protection doesn't scare me easily since I don't change hardware a dozen of times and usually there a way to get a new activation from the game pub if I did.

What a pile of nonsense. First they ruin the BF franchise with this turd of a game, then they pull this. They better rethink their actions or I'm done with their games.

Pretty much the same here. Sh*t like this always makes me think of an old friend, he already warned me about EA 12 years ago...

Well looks like this is about to blow up on the internet, getting some good traffic hilbert haha

Happened to me with the new Dragon Age: Inquisition patch too. Didn't even change any of my hardware. 🙁 Edit: Best solution I could see was to wait 24 hours. Not about to re-download the whole game and reinstall it and my OS.

Holy ****. This is just inexcusable. I was heavy in doubt whether to buy another game with EA sticker on it after all the crap they were responsible for with BF4, but I am decided now. I refuse to support this kind of company.

Went through the same thing at Techspot to do the review there. Took 3 accounts and some waiting around.

So the rumors about Origin are right! That's ****ing crazy... I have to say that I greatly prefer Hardline to any previous BF game, but why is EA so shady?

I think this has to do with the new banning system. As you know BF games are out of control with hackers.They now issue hardware ID bans like the old days. By you using multiple systems/parts now you faced/triggered this issue. This is just my thoughts on the matter.

Some never learn.

just another reason why we as consumers should stop supporting EA. let their stock shares drop, piss off their shareholders, board members fire the CEO and hopefully a new one will finally change things for the better.

Remember when I said EA is going to win the Golden Poo award again this year? Ubisoft, Blizzard, and Riot are trying to compete, but EA will be king for the foreseeable future. Another stark reminder of why I don't buy any EA games. I'm glad I have no interest at all in the BF series.