Fast Forward is an interesting idea. Skipping past things in combat the way we can skip past dialog or cut scenes might work, especially if its not a very engaging fight. Maybe it's not particularly 5e or D&D crpg, but I can imagine how it might work in a computer game. Like just roll for results, and it blows past all the opponents' stuff with some automated randomized result, and then shows the next up PC. It's similar to the randomizing elements that were involved in the "pause" + everything happening at once system from the old games. They just need a cleaner way to transition animations and to let the player know what has happened while they were fast forwarding hehe
I'm sure it would be more interesting with 6 PCs up than 4 though, at least for me, whatever scheme they end up adopting to make the combat play pace feel a bit faster.
Also, I really dislike how often the game uses AI "Allies" in the set piece combats. I feel like they are substituting all these NPC AI hangers-on to make the combats seem like they have a greater sense of scale, when I'd much rather it be more PCs in the party to balance off the hordes of opponents. Like especially the main EA battle, whether Gobbo or Grove, they both use a couple dozen rando NPC allies to balance for the number of enemies in the cascading combat arenas, whereas I'd prefer just having 6 PCs in the party who we could actually control.
