With the lack of showing us much of melee outside of pistol-whips I'm kinda worried the animations are going to be stiff and wonky again. If it got improved I think they would have shown it a bit more instead of focusing on ranged weapons.

That's one thing I always hated about 3/NV; melee/unarmed was very awkward...I just couldn't even force myself to do it in 3 or NV. I don't need combos or excellent animations, just something similar to...idk, Dying Light would be satisfying enough.

Did you see the E3 footage? They showed more than just pistol whips, dude.

Some raider got clubbed pretty nice with a bat with a saw blade on it. Looked decent to me.

And according to Quakecon folks, there seams to be some nice animations for scoring a melee crit.

Sweet. The blood'n'gore still looks as bad as in Skyrim, though. Mods will fix that =)

There's one really good shot of a raider taking a barbed bat to the head in the e3 video.. You can see the impact actually affecting the body rather than, as in past games, they just sort of fall limp or go flying off into the sky.

You can melee target kneecaps in VATS! According to one report from Quakecon.

We must turn everyone into a town guard!

Just without the arrow part lol.
"I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I took a razor blade studded baseball bat to the knee."
Yeah that's right. It's basically a post apocalyptic Macuahuitl! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macuahuitl