When people call the modern Fallout games "first-person RPGs" a part of me dies. A significant chunk of the appeal of them, just like The Elder Scrolls, is the option to flick back and forth between first-person and third-person at the press of a button. When I'm in a cramped tunnel full of ghouls with an air-cooled automatic rifle and a depleting supply of .308 rounds, I want to be in claustrophobic first-person. When I'm jogging across the countryside in a duster, or swinging a golf club at Fiends coming from every direction, I want to be in open third-person.
Modders have tended to focus on first-person animations, both because it's the more popular view and the easiest to tweak. Which is why it's taken until now for modder Wombat to bless us with a full third-person animation overhaul for Fallout: New Vegas. And yes, it does cover NPCs as well.
Enhanced Animations – 3rd Person Movement is apparently the first in a series of planned Enhanced Animation mods. As Wombat explains, "It covers all general movement animations when standing, which include idle, walking, running, jumping, and landing animations, all with directional variants. There are also some extra animations for melee weapon and minigun attacks, a bit of [a] teaser of what's to come in the future."
It also includes some bug fixes for animation issues that weren't covered in the previous 3rd Person Animation Fixpack mod, which focused on things like fingers bending at unlikely angles, stutters at the end of animation loops, and the way characters slide along the ground for a moment if you stop moving while turning the camera in third-person.
While some of the tweaks in the Enhanced Animations mod are extremely specific, like the one that makes leaning back while holding a minigun look less back-breaking, the improvements for melee attacks and jumps made during movement should be much more noticeable.
To install this mod you'll first need to install the kNVSE Animation Plugin and the JIP LN NVSE Plugin, both of which you may well have already as they're basic prerequisites for multiple mods. Then you can go ahead and add Enhanced Animations – 3rd Person Movement, and you'll be ready to minigun airborne cazodors to your heart's content.
