What does it mean going forward for players?

It reduces the animations count by a lot. For all the weapons they currently have in Star Citizen, they need 50. If you compare it to Crysis 2, they had 1200. It also forced them to animate differently and in a way that animations will be needed for a variety of different things. With the unified rig, animations aren't just fewer, but they can be shared as well. All the joints are able to be animated as well so in EVA when you jump off a platform, all of your limbs are physicalized so they aren't just ragdolled randomly, but based on physics.