While I know asking for full blown mo-capped fatalities like we had in Age of Conan is probably out of the question, I still think there could be some improvements to kill animations.
Nowadays, when games use ragdoll, usually there is a short little animation that will play before the actual ragdoll kicks in. So for example, a guy might react to a bullet by flying backwards in a short canned animation and then the ragdoll will kick in. Or maybe he might clutch his midsection and slump to his knees and then the ragdoll will kick in. Etc, etc.
Right now, it seems pretty lame that the characters will simply transition immediately into ragdoll and do a quick face plant regardless of how they die.
But if it’s too much work to create unique kill animations then perhaps just getting some improved ragdolls could make things look a little better. Right now the ragdolls don’t have too many points of articulation and so they look really stiff. Kind of reminds me of how ragdolls were in vanilla Skyrim or old school FPS games like Unreal. No real rotation on arms/legs and so the bodies all slump over in a stiff/rigid fashion. Perhaps adding a few more points of articulation to the bones of the models might help make things look a little better?
Just some suggestions. Coming from AoC where all the combat animations you guys put in were top notch, I was kind of surprised by how tame everything looked in this game by comparison. Take care.