I think one of the funniest things about Hitman is whenever you hit an NPC they always have to abruptly stop whatever their doing in one frame because there is no in-between. I heard in a TLOU commentary that they tried to smooth out the animation when hitting enemies using Joel/Ellie as a transitional curtain. But Hitman NPCs just pop up when you press that attack button and it makes it extra funny when they’re like tying their shoes and next thing they know they get pwned the fuck out.
Yeah it’s very difficult in a game like Hitman where the NPCs are not necessarily in combat mode but are part of the furniture essentially, so they could be doing anything that you’ve scripted - drinking, chatting, walking, leaning etc. And it’s a sandbox so the AI is roving about at all times.
Even if you added contextual transition interrupts to their behaviour before they transitioned into their attacked/combat behaviour, you can’t account for which direction the player attacks from, or which behaviour might be interrupted (unless you animated all of them for every NPC which would be a scope nightmare and likely cause some stability issues).
It could be smoother but I absolutely see why it isn’t.