Anthem is BioWare's upcoming co-op focused action-RPG that's all about mowing down hordes of enemies, flying around with various types of jetpacks, and naturally, collecting piles upon piles of loot. All of that is fairly standard stuff, but what might come as a bit of a surprise is that Anthem will attempt to diversify the usual shoot and loot formula by also focusing on the type of storytelling and decision-making many have come to expect from BioWare games.

How exactly all of that will pan out, I'm afraid I don't know, but what I can tell you is that BioWare has now gone into great detail about how the gear and progression systems will work in Anthem. Here's the full developer preview, as well as my brief summary:

The most important thing to take away from the video is that gear will not simply be a bunch of boring stat boosts. The more powerful and rare the item, the more interesting effects it will have available. These effects can range from stuff like increased explosive damage and more thruster power, to things like lowering all cooldowns by 50% or causing multi-kills to regenerate shields. 

Relatively simple stuff on paper, but when you consider you will be able to mix and match multiple items with multiple bonuses, there is a great deal of potential here to create a character that is unique to you. For example, if you find gear that focuses primarily on melee and jetpack traits, you can just zip around the battlefield and take out enemies in close quarters. On the other hand, you can also just throw caution to the wind, boost your explosive damage and area of effect by a ridiculous margin, and simply lob grenades around like they're going out of fashion. 

Whether things will be as diverse when players start min-maxing every build, that still remains to be seen, but it's certainly going to be interesting to follow Anthem as it slowly moves towards its February 22nd release date on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. To learn more about Anthem, as well as to catch any future developer updates, you should head on over to the official website.