In this specific case I could imagine it’s just a very low priority. It’s a first person shooter where the vast, vast, vast majority of the time you are exchang

In this specific case I could imagine it’s just a very low priority. It’s a first person shooter where the vast, vast, vast majority of the time you are exchanging gunfire with enemy characters or other players. Except for small sequences like the one in the OP, you are very rarely ever interacting with NPCs in a non-violent manner outside of cutscene (makes for some easy talking points about the state of the AAA games industry) so I imagine those animations don’t receive many resources budgeted towards them. CoD Infinite Warfare (I.e. “the one in space”) had sequences in between every mission where you could talk and interact with the crew of your spaceship and the NPC animations were a lot better there. Also they had a lot of NPCs modeled after celebrities for some reason (e.g. F1 driver Lewis Hamilton) so there was likely pressure to animate the NPCs better.