Yeah, spacing is basically non-existent; player and enemy attack distances are extremely broad, and a different anim will be selected based on how far the attack target is, and they’ll just slide to make up any distance in between. Really bad implementations will have differently-timed attacks, but smarter devs keep all the player attack anims roughly the same duration so you have more consistent rhythm.
An implication of this combat style is that you can’t really support more than one player weapon, because a) timing and spacing aren’t variables that you have to play with, and b) you’re developing grosses of anims for the player’s one weapon, rather than the 20-30 for a Souls-style weapon. Any time you have unique anims for ‘from behind’, ‘from side’, ‘from front’ you are looking at drastically reducing the player weapon count (this is a main reason why Sekiro only has one weapon: they added all these stealth attacks and it’s unfeasible to support more than one set of these anims. Another thing they could have done is run all stealth attacks from something like a dagger, so they could swap the main weapon (note how Shadow of Mordor carries a broken sword-dagger so they had the option to swap (they didn’t use that option)).
