Preface: Demo Impressions, I don't think this is something that will be rectified before the release, but still.

I'm quite disappointed by the use of canned animations when they show the close-up knockout animations where one can see the sweat and blood shoot out of the mouth. The stuff that was made popular by Fight Night.

The best way to spot them is to use Lidell to knockout someone with a Overhead-hook, if the close-up comes you can see that he just does a normal left or right hook. (See here.)

I noticed it first when I knocked out Rua while he was jumping at me with his knee and I knocked him out by hitting up with my right elbow while he was in the air. And then some canned animation of a right hook came.

Also there are not that many knockout-animations from a stand-up knockout. I wonder why they didn't use ragdolls because they have a such a nice engine where clipping is not happening very often. The most obvious exception is the mouthpiece that I often see clip through a person's chest.

I hope the next game will improve upon this. If they have to use canned animation, then they need to include so many that it isn't easy to spot them. :-)

They do use ragdoll.

I don't know what you're talking abuot, I've seen some glorious KOs

I'm not saying that everything looks shit. I'm just saying that it is quite repetitive to see the same canned KO-animations over and over again.

And that goes both for the actual fall in the KO and the close-up KO-moment... The second part is especially stupid because it isn't actually a close-up of a KO you've done, it's an pre-done animation that will put in according to some heuristics.

Wow, I hadn't notice that.  If it is true, and all the close up KOs are hooks regardless of what really happend than I agree.  Seems like a cop out to me, I'd rather them not give that 'Fight Night' angle at all if they're not going to even show what really happened,

I found a good video that illustrates my point about the close-up knockout animations here. Look carefully at the position of Lidell's head and hand in the real time knockout and then in the close-up. It doesn't match.

To back up my statement that they aren't ragdolls after they have been knocked out in the standing game I would have to compile a video that would include hundreds of the same animations from other people's videos... Rather tedious, so I'm not going to attempt that just yet. :-)