I dont know if Im just misinformed but in Skyrim when I shoot an arrow it goes above the crosshair
I know the crosshair doesn't show the exact place the arrow will go when your far away but I thought gravity was supposed to make the bow fall a little not make it go up

Get this , I don't even use crosshair and I'm completely fine.
I have no idea , Archery and arrows are perfectly fine for me.

Its because in the vanilla game the arrow has been set to automatically target an enemy, or shoot a tiny bit up. You can change that in the config file if your on PC so it will shoot from your cross hairs.

Arrows travel in an arc....if you're close they will hit above the crosshair, very far away they will hit below the crosshair

From the wiki:


http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Archery#Notes

Yeah, you have to change it in the .ini files to correct it.

At low levels every shot is not spot on. Experience will improve that as you level up.

Really ?
That's interesting !

I thought so too, but according to the wiki, skill does not affect accuracy.


http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Archery#Skill_Usage

Since it doesn't seem to matter if you get a head shot or you hit someone in the leg in the game (seems to do the same damage) I always aim low. Just aim for the midsection and you should be fine. Plus as you lvl your archery, it seems like it gets better with precision, but according to the above, this does not affect this, so maybe you will just get used to the aiming and it only seems like it's more precise... I personally don't like how accurate the bow is, I mean, if I'm really far away from the enemy I'm shooting, I think I SHOULD have to aim a little high to hit the target, but the arrow seems to pretty much go straight on no matter how far away you are.

But I think OP is talking about the auto-aim compensation. I'm not sure why they put it in, but they did.

It's completely normal and is dictated by your Skyrim.ini. If you're on one of the consoles, I'm afraid you're SOL and will just have to learn to cope with it.

I wasted so many arrows when I first started playing. Was compensating for the imaginary gravity and wind. so many arrows sailed over bear and elks hehe.

When enemies are close-medium distance, I shoot below them. When they're medium-far distance, I shoot at their body. When they're far-very far distance, I shoot at they're head. I never shoot above the head unless I'm sniping from across the map or else you'll overshoot. The arrows are so screwed up it's not even funny.

I actually never noticed the arrows went over the crosshairs. Even the PC version doesn't make it obvious to me. Seems this is an oddity or quirk that has been in all the main series 3D games beginning with Morrowind. Morrowind had some odd arrow action where it was worse. You had to shoot insanely high sometimes just for enemies to be hit by the projectile. I can't say much about Oblivion yet, as I only recently have gotten to using a bow. It does have the same weirdness, though.

Oblivion's archery is a bit less weird, at least. Skyrim just has a middle ground to me. I don't mind getting a miss or two. I might want to try the .ini edit now just to see if it does anything. I have played the console version of Skyrim and noticed nothing odd about the archery. Same with the PC version.

Excuse me as I research what has to be added to the .ini now.

There a few things you need to know about archery at its defaults.

- Gravity is a factor, and that might be why the angle compensation was implemented, to help those who, I dunno, don't know how to compensate for physics, maybe.
- I don't believe wind is a factor.
- At a certain distance, arrows will NOT - I repeat - will NOT register targets and will sail right through them. Many people may come to you and say, "Oh, I've pulled off shots at over 9000 ft, you must be mis-aiming, blah blah blah." This may be the case for some but do NOT immediately blame yourself. I spent 3 hours one day just practicing long-range archery on stationary targets. For consoles, this magical distance is at around the draw distance for NPCs. Luckily, if you're on the PC, you can fix this with a quick .ini tweak.