Seems EA is serious about this return to Steam.
Origin logo

With the recent announcement that EA was making a return to Steam, a number of questions remained unanswered. A couple of those questions focused on whether or not there would be support for things like cross-save or even cross-progression between EA's own Origin platform and Steam.

Fortunately, we have a few promising answers today. Most developers don't like to split their communities and EA is no exception. It seems they are working to get Origin to work similar to how Ubisoft's Uplay works with Steam.

A new patent was filed by EA on November 5 that indicates cross-save and cross-progression between Origin and Steam for EA developed titles. Here is the description for this new patent from RespawnFirst.

Individual users may log into the same online game from multiple different social networking platforms. The disclosed technology provides a way to unite users’ accounts such that users that have logged into the online game from different social networking platforms can have their progress in the online game preserved regardless of which social networking platforms the user logged in from.

Business intelligence about differences in the user’s value when logging in from the different social networking platforms can be determined and incentivizing actions can be performed on the social networking platforms based on the business intelligence.
There is just a small hurdle to deal with here. In order for this system to work, you will need to have an EA/Origin account. If you already have one, you can then link both your Steam and Origin accounts together. If you ever played an EA game on consoles, you're probably already familiar with this.

I have tried to find the patent myself for source linking purposes and was unable to find it through a quick search. The USPTO web search is just... bad.