I am a believer in removing unnecessary interfaces between the user and the game, in particular when the actions (or cancelling actions in this case) can be carried out in a much more streamlined and natural fashion.

With this in mind, one change (simple in concept, but addresses some of the unnecessary clunkiness) is to change some actions that have a "cancel.." option in the scroll menu, to be cancelled by simply moving (WASD), changing stance, or equipping a weapon, depending on the situation. Also, a simple universal cancel would be to just hit the use key again in any action sequence.

I think there are at least 3 situations that might be worth treating differently.

• Actions that are tied to a specific location (e.g. drinking from well, applying bandage/splint to another player), would be naturally cancelled by just moving away from the location (WASD), or equipping any other object (weapon, tool, food etc), or hitting use again.

• Actions that are not tied to any specific location and would benefit from being uninterrupted whilst moving (e.g. drinking from a bottle, equipping any object or weapon). These shouldn't be cancelled by WASD, but instead the animation just continues regardless of movement (player can stop and start at will). The natural logical cancel instead would be equipping any different object or weapon, or starting a different action. Alternatively, hitting use again for a universal cancel.

• Actions that can be partially completed but are too complex to do whilst moving, or are tied to a specific location (e.g. loading ammo into a clip [if made into an animation], filling a water bottle, fixing a vehicle). These could be cancelled at the point in time that the natural logical cancel is enacted by the player. E.g. when the player presses any WASD, the result of the examples would be: the clip would remain partly loaded, the water bottle partly filled, and the vehicle partly repaired...so action progress was not lost, but merely interrupted. The reason that this is important can be demonstrated using the clip loading example: a player would always prefer to just stick the half-loaded clip into the gun if they needed to use it at that point in time. It would literally be the difference between in-game life and death. The is no benefit to the player by completely undoing the action carried out so far, or forcing the player to wait for animation to complete.