The cutscene where you meet up with Faye and Haluk in the pirate princess' lair had me aching with disappointment that Bioware didn't just make this as one of their traditional RPGs. That scene feels so much like a great conversation in a Mass Effect game, complete with a Renegade Interrupt when your character suddenly reaches out and eats the pheromone sac. The writing is great, the tone is spot on, the facial animation could have been the next step forward for RPG storytelling... but ultimately it's just a pre-rendered cutscene. It just happens while you watch, and then you're back to shooting guys again because that's the only agency you have in this world.
Anthem has all the basic building blocks of a great RPG, and it's just such a shame it has to be a mindless loot game. I know loot shooters are better for the publisher's bottom line, but fuck it, RPGs are just a better kind of game. Anthem would be such a treat if you could actually have real conversations with the NPCs in Tarsis, and if you could fill your quest log and venture out into the world beyond the walls to bang out five of them without having to load into a separate instance and come straight back to Tarsis for every step of every quest line. And we know that Bioware could have made that game, and made it damn well. Yet here we are in this situation where a company synonymous with great RPGs goes and makes a loot shooter instead.