unless they are already in the game and I just havent noticed yet, but itd be cool to have one

doo iitttttt!

We haven't seen crossbows in a TES game since Morrowind

It's entirely possible to create a crossbow and use it in the game but that would require new animations and everything.

not sure if it is what i think it is, but on the centurions in the museum it looks like they have a crossbow on their arm.

And make it function realistically, so it takes a minute and a half to reload between shots.

Yes please! Also a hand crossbow.

yeah this would be a must, not a minute to load tho, but like say 10 -15 seconds, but the bolts are really powerful

be nice to see one

Yeah, the animations and modeling would be the difficult part. Modifying the play time of the Animations and adjusting the ratio of that speed versus the effect of it (Damage) would be easy in fact. Basically the models and animation are the only obstacles and honestly I believe you may be able to use mods for other TES games to accomplish that (or more than likely someone will figure out how to port stuff). A lot of the original Fallout 3 Mods were ports of Obsidian and a few Morrowind mods.

Wouldn't need a complete set of perfect animations. After firing, drop down the crossbow out of sight, and bring it back up loaded. This would simulate actually holding, keeping eyes on target while reloading. In third person, the animations can be a little rough and it wouldn't be that huge, AFAIK, you can't spin the camera around while fighting (could be wrong), but third person animations is where the difficulty is as modeling a cross bow is pretty easy, its just getting it in game.

Sneak attacking with crossbows (and other high damage weapons for that matter) would be hard to balance. Do you guys have any ideas on how to deal with that?

Apart from that, X-Bow ftw!

Actually, crossbows were invented before longbows. Longbows were made to get past steel armor.

They're actually weaker, but what if the mod made it like having a 5-shot clip to accomodate?

Yes to crossbows and also throwing knives. Another thing missing since Morrowind

Balance is something you do with multi player games, if Skyrim gets too easy, up the difficulty, it will increase your opponets HP. And, if it ends up being a god weapon, players can just open up the toolset and adjust the damage to what they want. When something in real life is extreamly powerful, we refer to it as a force multiplier, not over powered, and in RL, thats exactly what the cross bow was, but a slow relead time could easily reduce the effectivness of a crossbow. For instance, even if it one shot any humanoid in the game, with a 30+ sec reload timer, few people would use it as is.

If you make it so few people use it, why make the mod ? Make it have a fairly long reload time, say 20 seconds. It could even replace the bow for sneaky kills ! But don't let it get a x3 modifier, that would be almost as OP as the x15 daggers

That wasn't really the point, it was an example that reload times could easily effect a crossbow. And, OP is a multiplayer term. In singleplayer games, there is no balance, the player (Unless we're talking Dark Souls here) is almost always more powerful then anything else in the game. When the game gets too easy for the player, up the dificulty to add HP to your oponets, on hard that dagger x15 or a x3 on a crossbow won't do a whole lot.

I was really hoping they'd put crossbows back in the game, I want my assassin to really look and feel like an assassin.

They're in already actually, in a way. Dwemer Sphere Centurians use these awesome little hand-crossbows to shoot you at range. They look so cool! Unfortunately, they aren't equipable normally so some mod remains necessary for them. Good thing is some of the work has been done.

I just started working on my crossbow an hour ago
http://oi43.tinypic.com/517ypi.jpg

Was going to say 10-15 secs, zibafu ninja'd.

Crossbow needs distance based accuracy and power modifier to balance it. Point blank to 20ft would be deadly, and damage/accuracy would drop drastically from 20-100 beyond which it would be useless. With the new animation system it's highly likely that the hard coded limit on animations has been removed and we are no longer restricted to one animation set per weapon type which should allow us to add new weapon types.

As far as 3rd person animations are concerned if we can lock the camera behind the player like when chopping wood then we wouldn't need any reload animations and it could be faked easily.

But to make crossbows truely immersive NPC's must be able to use them, in wich case you do need a decent 3rd person animation for reloading.

I'm like to see all the guards using crossbows to be honest. It's easy to train and issue crossbows to guards and militia without needing the expertise of an archer. Point and shoot.

That's a good point. Let's hope we can access Havok Behavior somehow and this will be possible.

While you're at it, single-shot crossbows were only a European thing. The Chinese have had repeating crossbows since before their Immortals putatively met the Spartans in the service of Xerxes and, until the deveolpment of the rifled barrel, the repeating crossbow was the most advanced single-operator weapon on the battlefield. After the Greeks tried and failed to reverse engineer the weapon of the Immortals, the Romans developed the Scorpius. This was a slow loading single-shot weapon requiring at least two operators, but a single bolt shot from a Scorpius could perforate the shields of several men standing in line (as well as perforating the men as well) and may have led to the perception that Roman soldiers needed to learn to fight in more dispersed formations (i.e. loose formations favouring the Spatha over the Gladius; being less vulnerable to weapons like the Scorpius).
.
The repeating cross-bow is an assault weapon and, if memory serves, it was only ever outperformed by breech-loading rifles. If the Nords get crossbows, the Altmer (& by extension, the Thalmer) should get repeating crossbows (with gravity-fed cartidge on the top of the weapon), and the Imperials should get the Scorpius (instant death if hit by a Scorpius bolt and only operable with the assistance of your in-game companion NPC). Regular crossbows would take at least twice as long to reload and aim as a bow, while the repeating crossbow can be reloaded in half to three-quarters of the time to redraw a bow without necessarily losing aim. This rate of fire for a repeating crossbow would only apply to a journeyman-expert level bowman. By comparison, breechloading rifles generally take much longer to reload, but due to their much higher effective range they gain superiority over repeating cross-bows. It is important to remember that limitations on rate of fire, range, and accuracy are all favoured or disadvantaged by different conditions and that it is the correct selection of technology with respect to the nature of the ground which determines its effectiveness.
.
One more thing. Longbows are argued by some to be the most powerful single-shot weapon of the period. An arrow from a longbow could perforate carbon steel plate armour and had a tremendous range if the archer understood the ballistics. Longbowmen had to be trained from childhood and so I think that a correction is due here. Longbows should be the most powerful single-operator ranged weapon in the game - but should also require master or, at least, expert level archery skill to use. The longbow is also almost as tall as the archer that wields it, so if the correction is made by somoeone the former "longbows" in the game need to be renamed "shortbows" and the longbow placed with a mesh of its own. The design is very simple but, in its time and place, the longbow was very much the cutting edge of military technology.
.
Anyway, just some thoughts...

But, thats extending the mod to also equip NPCs with crossbows. Just a basic mod to allow the player a crossbow would need to come first.

But, if anyone is building a crossbow mod, and needs help, let me know. I have 3dsMax, proficent in Maya and Photoshop (And have both as well).

Sounds awesome for thief/assassin type characters. When I make my black khajit ninja cat, I will be looking for a hand crossbow mod, so there better be one!

As it has already been said, the model and its animations are the hard part. Besides that you just need to make a new bolt projectile and have it fire like an arrow, but with reduced/no arc.

I would suggest it do extra damage against heavily armored targets with short range effectiveness, while having a slower reload time. A self-reloading Dwarven Crossbow would be cool as well (with a clip of maybe 4-6 bolts).

Hand-spanned crossbows take about 5 to 6 seconds to reload and fire.