The players may have celebrated too soon: In the Anthem subreddits, several players reported in the past hours that a countdown had appeared on the live servers. Many freelancers were excited and assumed that the pre-events of the Cataclysm would now begin. However, BioWare dashed that hope…
What was that countdown? In the subreddits for Anthem, several players recently posted screenshots of a timer. In the challenges within the game, there was talk of an “impending storm”, along with a countdown of seven days.
The players were supposed to contribute in these days to the efforts to stop this impending storm. To do this, three tasks had to be completed:
- Defeat 60 crystallized enemies
- Destroy 20 crystals
- Complete 8 crystal world events
What was the countdown supposed to announce? The players hoped that it would finally signal the long-awaited Cataclysm would begin. This was supposed to be released in May, but was postponed for the developers to address the issues with Anthem.
The event has already been under scrutiny for some time on test servers. The test servers are open to all PC players of Anthem who own the game or are subscribers of Origin Access Premier. Console players unfortunately cannot participate in the tests so far.
The players thought that with the countdown, the Cataclysm would finally begin on the live servers. This will be an eight-week event, of which the first two weeks are to be a kind of “introduction”.
The players only became suspicious when the countdown appeared, but nothing else happened in the game.
What does BioWare say? Shortly after the players discovered the countdown and shared it on Reddit, Community Lead Andrew Johnson spoke up on Twitter.
According to his tweet, a change went live by accident that was supposed to be released at a later time. This change was reverted, and they apologized to the players for the confusion.
Thus, the countdown refers to something that went live on the servers prematurely. A date for when the Cataclysm event will actually start was not mentioned.
