I would love to see some ideas tossed around on how to redesign the archery system in Skyrim so it is more intuitive and realistic.

Some of the Ideas flowing through my head would be the following.

• Positional Damage - Head shots net higher critials then say a limb shot
  
• Realistic Arrow Flight Model - Arrows fly at realistic speeds and still do damage at extreme distances unlike current vanilla skyrim where arrows no longer hit at range
  
• Bleeding- Hitting a main artery or vital organ causes the enemy to bleed out the speed at which it bleeds out depends on the organ or artery hit
  
• Redone Animations - Enemy animations react fluidly to being hit by an arrow. For example - A rushing Bandit would stumble forward and fall if he is hit in the leg while in full sprint towards the player, he would drop his weapon if an arrow hits his hand.
  
• Realistic Arrow weight physics - Enemies no longer fly 5-10 feet after being killed by an arrow.
  
• Range Sighting system - Moving the mouse wheel up and down increases or decreases the arrows point of impact by 50 meters.

What other ideas do you have ?

How can Archery be improved in Skyrim?

The first two I think would be incredibly complex. The only way I can imagine it being done is to somehow recreate the creatures with separate parts and script the individual parts to detect a hit. I don't even know if that could be done. Technically, if you could get the positional damage part down, the bleeding could probably just be accomplished by the scripting rolling a random number to see if an artery were hit.

The third one seems the most doable of those, but would require scripting every NPC and creature. If the same script commands available for Morrowind are still in use, then the script could check for being struck by an arrow and then, possibly, activating an animation loop. That still might be quite complex though. Also, animations in general are a pain from what I've read from others. Not impossible, and maybe easier since they have prebuilt animations to work with, but still it would be no small feat.

The last one would probably be undoable. The problem is the physics engine itself, and the fact that everything, including humanoids and large creatures, seem to be nearly weightless. The only potential solution I can come up with would be some method of tweaking the physics engine, and again, I don't know if that's really possible.

I didn't comment on the others because I don't even have a vague idea of what could be done for those. Others might though.

I'm pretty sure most if not all these are quite possible when we get the Creation kit. I've seen many of them in Oblivion, and since the engine is pretty much the same it'll no doubt be possible here as well.

I have been extremely active in modding oblivion archery and melee combat over the last few years. (I did the Duke Patrick Combat Archery mod).

Try this in your Skyrim.ini file:

[Combat]
fMagnetismStrafeHeadingMult=0.0
fMagnetismLookingMult=0.0
f1PArrowTiltUpAngle=0.7
f3PArrowTiltUpAngle=0.7

The Arrow fires intuitively thru the cross hair now and then falls (as in Oblivion and most other games) and not up over it anymore!

This was the primary thing that was killing my enjoyment with archery in skyrim. And I was girding my teeth waiting for the construction set so I could fix this.
But this INI tweak will do nicely until the Kit is released.

Once the kit is out then location hits will be possible (at least for head shots) as it only requires some triangulation math and very simple get pos commands to do a crude version. If it is possible to get the arrow's ref then a better version is also possible (the way I do it in my Oblivion mod).
And then after that some other needed tweaks.

Good tip. Thanks!

As far as headshots causing more damage, I've been experiencing this already in the game.

If I'm sneaking and my arrow hits someone in the back, I don't usually kill them outright, however, if I aim for the head, more often than not I get a one-shot kill.

Can anyone else verify this as well, because that's what I've experienced

i cannot completely verify it but i noticed it aswell, had a deer and my arrow hits on body took about 1/4 of its health per shot, i had two hits so it was at about 50% then i striked a lucky one into its head and it was instantly dead

theere are NO headshots now and never been in es games , head feet anything its same thing

That's what mods are for. In my opinion headshots does not work well with the close combat of TES but headshots for arrows makes perfect sense. I think headshots should do double, or maybe even triple, what the same shot would do to any other part of the body. I also think they need a higher level perk for the increased stealth damage with bows (and to seperate it from the melee damage tree in Sneak) because, especially now with the reduced backpeddling (which I support as a feature), bows are FAR more advantageous as stealth weapons than open combat weapons, but because of their lack of stealth damage perks (why do daggers get 15x but bows only 3? Stealth attacks are a good way of representing a more careful and focused shot without the enemy being able to defend in any way) this means stronger enemies are terrible to fight against with bows because they will see you and you will have to engage in open combat most of the time.

How about having it so that you cannot move your legs whilst your bow is drawn? This always bugged me as you can't really move at all when you've got a long bow drawn. Also, some stamina drain or increased aim sway if you hold your bow drawn for more than a couple of seconds.

Arrows shouldn't be weightless - 0.2 should do it.

A smithing perk allowing you to make special arrows with either bleeding damage or bonus against armour would be nice.

As spookyfx said. All these things will ultimately be fixable with the CK.

I for one (and probably duke too) will be making another big combat mod and location damage is very high on my critical list (immediately after doing something about blocking). I suspect animation will be slower in coming than gameplay mechanics, because the new animation format has yet to be unpicked, but there's a lot of interesting stuff that can be worked on in the mean time to make combat feel much more fluid and realistic than it currently is.

Thank you so much this really made archery more enjoyable.

Has anyone discovered the ini command that controls how much force an arrow has upon landing.

Not the amount of damage it does but instead how much it pushes an npc back after a death shot.

I assume this is modifyable considering firebolt spells have less force then say a shout.
Would be nice to lower the amount of physical force arrows have upon killing someone. Seeing the enemy fly back 10 feet is starting to get silly.

yes, thank you spookyfx.com!

Here is a ini tweak to remove the rangelimit on archery and magic:)

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1279548-archery-magic-range-limit-fix/

Thx to saeb for spreading the word! And one up for Azula ll for the fix:)

I'm currently going with this one http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=601 .

As far as i play tested (only 3 enemies, I had to rush it), it seems like it works. The enemies no longer fly off in random directions after hitting them with my sword, but stay down, where they should be, eating the dust off the floor. It has a lot of downloads, so I'd check it out until a really good physics mod pops up.

If there is anyone more gifted with handling Gamebryo combat mods - and especially those related to realistic training and archery - than Duke Patrick I know that person not. Thanks for chiming in on this, I will immediately try these settings. Both my Stealth and Warrior characters use bows, and the natural arc of the arrow missing from the game just ruins aiming.

Very much appreciated.

Good to know we're going to have both Duke and yourself overhauling combat! =D

Actually, changing how far arrows go should be very easy, in past engines there was a simple global variable for how far projectiles could go before, I assume, getting deactivated.

The physics one could also be easy if the engine hasn't changed too much. There was a global setting for death force that gets applied to something when it is killed. Bleeding could be accomplishable through some nice scripting, but doing it without having an enchantment on every arrow or every bow would be the tricky part. In FO3 it was possible because there was an enchantment slot, and an effect slot, if I recall correctly, but that may be back to one slot for Skyrim.

Animations and hit-boxes are a whole other trouble that could be possible down the road, but I wouldn't expect until several versions of SKSE are out.

regarding realistic flight it does actually fly right. and you can get pretty extreme shots through ive gotten shots in at times i thought dummies were people because i was so far out. the issue what makes those shots hard is the overshot on the crosshairs. although there is a limit on the distance of the shots. the easiest way to know that is to shoot an arrow straight into the air and it wont come back down. it could be tied into the fact that arrows might have an "arrow life" type attribute which when complete causes the arrow to disappear.

Because basically it is rewarding a better stealth character. You can not be stealthy at all and get a sneak attack from quite a distance away, where as if you're wearing heavy armor and don't have a few perks in sneaking, you've got NO chance of ever seeing that 15x bonus. It's about game balance at that point because a character with NO sneaking ability whatsoever can still hit sneak attacks with a bow. Agreed though, a sneak attack modifier needs to be added to the Archery tree so that people who specialize in ARCHERY get a similar bonus that does not stack with the stealth bonus.

Suggestion, makes a perk governs how far the arrow flies in a straight line before being affected by gravity (arching downwards).

will be working on the body hit so that if you hit someone in the head its much more likely to crit and kill than hitting them in the knee or something...
so im not sure if bethesda will be working in gibs or not, but will be looking into that as well... hopefully we can come up with at least a proper body position hit system to make your hits more or less effective depending on were the blow lands and what kind of armor and defense a given NPC or PC has.

along with a ton of other stuff as well, check out what we are planning here: http://www.thenexusforums.com/index.php?/topic/463687-realism-mod/page__p__3820554__fromsearch__1#entry3820554