I've had a bit of a break-through...
I managed to install the game and bypass the updates, so I was basically playing with version 1.0
The cutscenes work PERFECTLY. No lag, no crash, just beautiful video. So I think this definitely surfaced in a recent update. I will try updating again tomorrow to see if that breaks it again but I'm silently optimistic since this time I installed it to my system drive instead of my secondary.
Seriously?! Updates are meant to fix things, not break them!
How did you bypass the updates? When I started having this issue (which was immediately following the 1/17 patch), one of the first ideas I had was to uninstall & reinstall....but I was unable to get Origin to NOT install the updates. Just curious what I might have missed. Since it doesn't appear a patch that fixes the patch is forthcoming, rolling back to pre-patch would be nice...or would at least make the game playable again.
