During this year, we’ve seen combat animations greatly improved. More interaction, more options, and now with the Pet system about to be unleashed, even more combat options for shields and off-hands. This suggestion, since there’s already folks working on combat animations, is to add more ‘realistic’ variety to the engagement, not so much for the player’s actions, but rather for the NPCs.
Specifically, we never see NPCs slip, or stumble, or trip, or over-extend, or stagger, or become unbalanced. Maybe every Exile has maxed out Agility, but I would suspect its rather that the NPCs are limited to just a set of attacks that they repeat. So to make a fight more realistic and less predictable, introduce some ‘mistake’ animations. Let an NPC make mistakes and have to recover from those mistakes. Maybe throw in a little ‘dirty fighting’ such as falling to the ground and throwing sand in the face of the player (hits the screen briefly). Or the NPC trips on a loose rock, and rolls on the ground before getting back up. It makes the fights less predictable and more real when things aren’t the same every time.
And these animations shouldn’t happen all the time in all fights, but rather be something ‘unexpected’ (reduced percentage so that happen every once in a while - not every maneuver nor even every fight).