I know that nunchaku are near an dear to your heart but I would be extremely surprised if it appeared at launch. I could see it somewhere down the road but honestly I wouldn't expect to see it for a good long time as there is a big list of things they want to do post launch. this isn't to say it couldn't happen just that I suspect the odds are not in your favor on getting them at launch or soon there after.

I hope you get your nanchaku, Paladin. Never been a big fan of them, myself, but I have a cousin who has been practicing with them (and everything related to them) for over forty years.

TheMightyPaladin wrote:

I just want to hear it from the Devs.

Please understand I'm not on the animation team. I do however understand the complexity of animating nunchaku. While there are no guarantees I would say its pretty safe to assume such a thing won't be available at launch.

I can say that the engine does have some native tools built in that lend toward the possibility, that is provides some foundational tools that with work could lend toward the possibility. Due tonthe work involved itnwould most likely be a post launch animation. Again at this time it is too early to confirm defiiively yes or no. Only that its possible and most likely post launch.

And dev har aside, I'm a huge fan of Bruce Lee owing all his films, books based on his life, and his Tao of Jeet Kun Do. I've met several of his first generation students, and trained with a second gen student for several years. As a fan I'd like to see what many consider to be his 'signature weapon' in this game too.

Now what our animation system will allow for is for you to pick a power set that provides the play style you are interested in, and if the animation style isn't immediately available, should it come out later you could choose to change the animations.

If it is true that you feel that strongly about a particular animation (much less a playstyle which is what really drives our design) then I'm sorry you have to go.
If you do decide to stick around or at least keep tabs on happenings 'round these parts just keep in mind a couple of things about the reality of our situation:

We are a tiny team in MMO terms. Heck we are small for typical game dev teams much less MMOs.

We are running on a fraction of the budget an MMO takes. We're talking less than a tenth of a budget of a 'designed on a budget' MMO. In comparison to your typical MMO
budgets, we aren't even a drop in the bucket for funding.

We are a volunteer team. People have paying jobs, families, and other life commitments that vie for their time for working on a game w/ out pay.

Any MMO has to budget their resources, (funding, hardware, software, and dev time) for designing what gets into the game and when.

Our launch is more of a 'soft launch'. we aren't launching with the full 1-50 builds. We aren't including our full roster of classification. We aren't launching with our full roster of specifications. We are launching with just 5 power sets for the classifications pegged for launch.

We aren't going to have every kind of animation everyone will want to see at launch. We won't have every weapon model, or particle-based fx at launch either. It will take us time to get there. I hope you decide that we're worth at least following up on and trying out later, and hopefully, once experiecing actual gameplay, you'll find yourself having fun and not running into barriers keeping you away.

I suppose we all have specific little "hope-to-get" features that we care about more than others in MMOs. Clearly Paladin has a big thing for nunchaku. I myself had several "hope-it-happens" things for CoH and over the course of 8.5 years it turns out a few of them did finally happen there. Not everything I wanted, but at least some of them.

As everyone here knows it's hard to wait so long for a game like this. The best we can do is have the patience to reserve full judgment on it until there's an actual full game there to judge. Even after it launches people will have to decide if it provides enough fun to stick with it for the long haul. Like Brand X implied no game will ever be able to deliver 100% of everything people want from it but if it can provide the right combination of elements then it can be much easier to overlook the one or two "pet" features you may really want but didn't get.

When CoH first launched I really wanted wings for several of my characters. At the time there was absolutely no hint from the Devs that they would ever happen and it took 2.5 years before they finally did happen. I could have easily given up on CoH for lack of wings but as it turns out I had plenty of fun DESPITE the wings and I suspect I would have continued to have fun even if wings had never happened. The point here is that we need to give games like CoH and CoT a chance to be entertaining regardless of a few "hope-to-get" features that may or may never happen. Hopefully people like Paladin will come to realize that in the long run.