Does my character have kill animation and special attacks?

[MurderMan]

Similar to VATs execution in New Vegas when I can see my character fire the last lethal shot. 

[Wormerine]

I don't think so. The only think like that so far is companion attacks. The time slowdown thing, does all that is said it does, and doesn't trigger a cutscene. Considering gameplay is FPS I wonder how your model looks from outside (if it exist in full in presentable way). Unlike NV OW doesn't have functional 3rd person view.

[Infinitron]

I think there might be occasional "cinematic" slow motion death animations when your character kills an enemy, but you don't see yourself firing.

Edited August 7, 2019 by Infinitron

[Clawdius_Talonious]

If there are these sorts of animations we haven't seen them, but I don't believe there are kill cam animations for your player. There's an argument to be made about kill cams in e.g. Skyrim literally robbing you of kills by messing with the speed things happen and so the camera pauses and then shows you... your arrow miss. Fallout 3 had more of this problem, and while Fallout 4 avoids this by magicking a bullet into existence between you and the target and watching the bullet hit the enemy (avoiding the projectile hitting banisters, guard rails etc.) there are... a fair amount of issues that would have to be ironed out with this system.

The current system seems to teleport your allies into positions where they can definitely hit enemies, and then play their animation. There's also the fact that they're not giving third person camera access to the player at any time, so there is ample reason to believe that they won't even animate a variety of player actions in a third person sense. There may be standardized canned animations for any humanoid that do apply to the character's third person model, but they won't be given the kind of QA and polish they would need for them to be the full focus of the entire game even for a few moments every now and then.

It's not impossible that we could see these sorts of animations in the game by any means, but with a limited budget, cutting fluff like this is a good way to focus QA on unraveling bugs in the quest system and other things that are more important to the primary player loop than kill cam animations. The variety of weapons on offer is a blessing and a curse, in the sense that you limit what you can do in terms of universally applicable animations. This means that you'd need to have animations for various types and lengths of melee weapon, e.g. a bludgeon might be able to decapitate a foe but it wouldn't look the same as a bladed weapon, a two handed melee weapon would look different than one handed etc. Then you have ranged weapons, heavy ranged weapons will animate differently depending on how you hold them, are they underslung heavy weapons with a handle on top, a rifle you hold to your shoulder? Do they have a scope or iron sights? Then you have one handed ranged, pistols and such, which would benefit from animating vastly differently in situations the entire game pauses to focus the camera on you.

Some of this can be reused for all human NPCs, some might not be able to be used as readily. Would it make sense for science weapons to animate the same as their equivalent counterparts? Do NPCs ever use the science weapons or just the player character?

I don't think they would be playing this particular card close to their vest if it were in their hand, it would be a big flashy hollow display, which is perfect for marketing and demo reels. You get to show off all the flash and don't have to worry that you'll be giving up anything of substance in a game with a finite amount of story that you don't want to spoil when you can avoid doing so.