That's a really neat design document - when you're talking about animations in multi-player, do you mean some sort of frame buffering or delay solution to synchronise gameplay over latency? I assume all of the animation is being managed client-side, as opposed to host-side. Netcode is kind of interesting.
In multiplayer, the remote client animations have to be inferred as position updates and similar are lerped between the last known point and the new point. Really the only thing to update here is to handle the multi-frame animations in MP properly.
Do you see any large-name titles coming out this Xmas season that might interfere with the sales of AVWW2? A repeat of what I've seen you call the Diablo 3 effect might not be nice.
Erik keeps up with that more than I do, and I'm not aware of anything. We're keeping a close eye on the timing from... multiple angles, anyhow.
edit: Weird request: I have a weird fondness for placeholder artwork. Got any you can share? 
Not until the game is more final, sorry -- people take that out of context too easily, so releasing something like that "into the wild" has a good chance of coming back and biting us in the butt.
