Yeah Steve. 3 vs. 4 GB is totally arbitrary. Hell, BF2 patches were 2GB plus and that was several years ago.
You launch it from Origin, but that opens your browser, which opens to a webpage that manages launching the game in whatever mode you select (multiplayer, co-op, singleplayer). The whole idea is kinda stupid because you still have to change your settings in the game and whatnot.
Anyways, I got it installed, worked pretty decent through the first few levels of SP. My initial review:
1) Buggy. I'm only through the first ... 4? missions and already ran into two pretty large bugs. For the one, I had to replay from a savepoint probably 6 times to get it to work properly. For the other one, I ran into it just before I quit on Tuesday so replaying that mission might fix that one. Either way, that's shitty.
2) The graphics are fucking awesome. Best I've seen in a game so far. And that's saying a lot considering my machine is 3 years old and barely above the min CPU requirements. I left the video on auto and it put most stuff on High and I see no lag or any other video issues at that level.
3) The jet mission was fucking sweet and I was only the gunner, not the pilot. The rest of the gameplay is pretty good.
4) More buggy... I had issues getting the game to go truly fullscreen. It was in windowed mode for a while and then flipping over to the browser for a second and then back seemed to fix it, but not every time.
5) I feel like there is a lack of understanding what to do in some instances. Like the very first mission, you are on a subway and you have to jump out and then back into the next car. What they don't make clear at ALL is that you have to repeatedly press the space bar, otherwise you just fall the fuck off and die. I had to google that one to figure out how to get past it. There was another part of a mission where you're supposed to jump in a hummer and man the 50 cal and I had no idea I was supposed to do that, so I'm sitting there shooting motherfuckers left and right FOREVER until I figured that out.
As far as Origin itself, it is also buggy. When applying the patch, it did it, but apparently got 'stuck' in update mode and I thought it was still installing the patch for a good 8 hours... I woke up the next morning (~14 hours after it started) and it said it was still updating. So I killed it and restarted it and it magically said it was done after about 10 seconds. Fuckin bullshit.
SO in a nutshell, despite the bugs and annoyances, I will continue to play it because it looks sweet and I enjoy the gameplay.