Anthem: Signs Appear as Cataclysm Nears
Written by Jonathan Lee, July 18, 2019. 5:00pm. Tweet to: @Writerscube
New Signs Over the Horizon… Literally!
Since the last announcement of the Cataclysm event, Bioware has been pretty hush about what all’s been going on with development. This is also all in light of Bioware just about abandoning their original development roadmap, but given how slow things have been going, it seems to have been for the best. But new murmurs of excitement are beginning to rise amongst the Anthem faithful as some strange anomalies have appeared. In the Freeplay map, if you venture northwards, you’ll notice now there is a growing storm cloud. This is likely the approaching Cataclysm that will cover the land.
Not only that—some strange black tentacles are reaching skyward, ripping through that storm, grasping for something beyond our perception. What on earth could be going on?
Furthermore, on Reddit, by a user named crazypostman21, there’s been a sighting of a space station sort of anomaly.
Bioware’s Keeping Quiet for the Most Part: A Good Sign or Bad?
Before we try to look deeper, we should probably first look at what Bioware has been doing as a developer. Most noticeable is how they aren’t as frequent or vocal with their updates. They’ve been relatively quiet on what’s been going on as they continue working on the release of the Cataclysm event. This is sort of reminiscent of how Hello Games of No Man’s Sky, possibly one of the greatest comebacks in recent gaming history (next to Final Fantasy XIV). No Man’s Sky almost crashed in publicity in light of many promises not being kept. Hello Games went quiet after a period of attempted damage control. And it worked incredibly well in their favor. Instead of trying to talk their way out of it, they hunkered down and set out to just fix the game and make it the best it truly could be.
Understandably, players were ecstatic with the impressive updates and seeing the earnest efforts of Hello Games.
I think this is what’s happening right now with Bioware. I think they’re trying to just find a quiet place to focus their energies on being developers instead of managing PR. This worked for Warframe. No Man’s Sky recovered beautifully. Bioware can do it too. With EA voicing their support behind Bioware’s Anthem, we can maybe not worry AS MUCH that Anthem might get axed out of nowhere while Bioware’s fixing it up behind the scenes.
What Could a Space Station and Tentacles Mean for Anthem?
Honestly, I don’t think it has anything to do with the Cataclysm event at all. We’ve already seen glimpses of what players have been flying around in the test servers. The Cataclysm is going to be an intensive objective-based activity that takes place in familiar Freeplay areas, all with a nice terrible hurricane-like storm. As I’d mentioned in my previous article on this subject, there’s also promise of new loot and we’re supposed to finally get new Masterwork and Legendary Support Gear. Whatever changes will be made to Cataclysm from test server feedback will likely be for gameplay tweaks and possibly cosmetic improvements to the stormy conditions, since initial reactions were a little underwhelming.
But that space station? Those tentacles? Even with Bioware staying mostly quiet, they still want to tell us a story. And I think we just got our first taste of foreshadowing of what’s to come.
Final Thoughts… and Some Theory Time on Anthem
We’ve got very little to go on as to how Humanity landed on this world in the first place. The Shapers were failed Creators and they left us with their half-finished world. But what about humanity’s history? Why did we seek such a chaotic world in the first place? True, we have a ton of lore for how the Freelancers came about. We know of other alien races that humanity has tangled with, including the Urgoth revealed at the end—an alien race that actually once enslaved humankind before Tarsis led us to freedom in the Legion War.
But what about all that came before? Does that space station perhaps belong to humanity before we settled on this world? Does it belong to one of the other alien races? The potential for all the historical lore that we could discover is dizzying. And I say this because this is Bioware’s kind of thing.
Whether it’s Mass Effect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, or Dragon Age, Bioware loves building historical lore for their game worlds. It fleshes things out, and they know it and seem to love doing it. This also falls in line with their evolving narrative that they want Anthem to have. I’m guessing we will discover more about Shapers as the narrative goes on, much like how Shepard discovered more about the Reapers.
And those tentacles coming out of the huge storm? Of course, there needs to be something big and bad. But what could it be? I wager that it’s Shaper-related, and I’m sure a lot of us were already thinking that. But why tentacles? I’ve been pondering on the physical nature of the Shapers since reaching Anthem’s endgame. On one hand, Javelin tech was discovered through Shaper artifacts. But on the other, we see Shaper devices create creatures of all kinds of designs—inspired by what is anyone’s guess, from a story standpoint. Sure we could just say they’re probably humanoid, like we’d expect in *insert popular scifi show or series here*. But let’s give Bioware the benefit of the doubt. After all, they brought us the galactic-cycle-overlords that we all came to know as the Reapers.
