Numbers first: eight weeks of event, two of them as a prelude, with three new missions and its own cinematic scenes. That was the package BioWare presented at the end of May 2019, in a live Twitch stream, for Anthem’s Cataclysm, the biggest post-launch content promised for the game up to that point.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/432174289
The context helps explain the expectation. Anthem, BioWare’s action shooter with flying suits (the Javelins), had been released on February 22, 2019 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC and received mixed reviews on Metacritic. Critics praised the combat, the flight and the visuals, but pointed to excessive repetition, shallow gameplay, technical problems and a weak story. EA’s target was to sell 6 million copies by the end of March 2019 and it admitted it did not get there. In practice, this meant the post-launch content needed to convince those who had already abandoned the game.
For weeks, BioWare’s communication about Anthem was scarce, and part of the community began to speculate that the studio was setting the game aside in favor of the next Dragon Age. The Cataclysm presentation was the answer: the event would first go to a public test server and then be released to everyone, in sequential acts.
What came next
Cataclysm slipped a few more months and only arrived in August 2019, split into acts. In October came the first content season, heavily compared to the earlier event. In February 2020, BioWare announced it would reinvent the game’s foundation in a long-term plan, but on 24 February 2021 it ended any future development and moved the team to Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Sales of premium currency ended in July 2025, and Anthem’s servers were shut down on 12 January 2026, leaving the game, which depended on them to run, officially unplayable.
Source: BioWare.
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