The Witcher 3 is pretty great, but if you're not a fan of Geralt's sword-based combat, you're mostly out of luck. Sure, there are a few axes, some crossbows, and a mace, and there's always magic of course, but Geralt is mostly a swordsman. He doesn't even like using a shield most of the time.
However, that doesn't mean such animations don't already exist in The Witcher 3--they're just used by people other than Geralt. The Advanced Combat System mod allows Geralt to tap into the movesets of those NPCs to give him a more well-rounded martial toolkit.
"ACS grants the player the ability to use all humanoid NPC combat animations available in the game, such as Eredin's, Olgierd's, Dettlaff's, spear, halberd, etc, along with numerous special abilities," reads the mod's description on Nexus Mods. "Also enhances the AI and behavior of certain human enemies, adds various NPC weapons as enemy loot, and spawns custom monsters into the game world."
This mod adds a lot, but we're going to stick with the new movesets that are added (read: stolen) from other NPCs. Each of these movesets have unique combos, special attacks, counters, visual and special effects, dodges, rolls, parries, hit and death animations, and animations for casually holding the weapon while standing still. There's also a higher vampire claw combat ability while the player is unarmed, and more bow and arrow combat with special arrows and abilities.
Perhaps most crucially, the Advanced Combat System mod provides Witcher 3 players with something they've been asking for years: animation cancelation. This is a good thing, too, as many of the new movesets handed over from NPCs have particularly long animations that were designed to give Geralt an opening to attack.
To use special moves, the player will have to unlock the Whirl combat ability and have it equipped. There are two different combo modes and several weapon modes that allow you to assign movesets to magic signs, equipment, and even mix and match specific moves.
You can see the Armiger moveset mode in the trailer above, which looks fairly impressive. And of course, you can download the Advanced Combat System mod over on Nexus Mods (with thanks to PCGamesN).