The denock arrow mod that allows you to cancel a draw.

I'm happy with the archery in Skyrim, it's a lot of fun with the perks and poisoning options. However, I agree with the other posters that mentioned Mount and Blade archery. When you are at low levels, you're terrible at it, but it has a similar mechanic as Skyrim in that the more that you use it successfully and put points in it, the better you get and the tighter the targeting reticule gets. Horse archery is an absolute blast, full speed on your horse, turning around and putting an arrow in the face of a heavily armored knight foolish enough to pursue you, ye olde Parthian Shot trick. I've often thought while playing Skyrim that it'd be a lot of fun doing the Cantabrian Circle around the giants and mammoths in the plains west of Whiterun. Or for the very brave (or foolish) the heavy armored warhorse and long lance. Lancing giants, might end up a new form of space travel for the player.

skyrims archery is about as realistic as the elves and dragons themselves.......total fantasy. you can hold you bow forever, there is virtually no sway and your arrows barely deviate off course if at all. mount and blade has it about as close to when i did archery years ago. you cant hold you bow forever and you arrow actually drops in flight so you have to aim above enemies to hit them and the arrows are more likely to be deflected because of wind. gameplay vids rarely do any game justice.

The only problem with Skyrim's archery is the distance limit, feels weird. Also, having a friend that has competed several times on national and (some) international archery tournaments, the arrows in Oblivion seemed to fall too easily, as he used to complain. Now instead the arrows are fired upwards.

Of course, maybe arrows back then were heavier, I handn't thought about that. The wind is also not taken into account.

Overall is a pretty fun experience, I don't think It needs much work when you have so many other ways of improving the game.

I like the archery better in this game, I do hate the terrible arrow range.

I couldn't hit a ice troll standing still 5 ft in front of me. I stink at archery.

Cheers

I agree with the OP
I like archery in Skyrim and enjoy using it for longer distances, and my two-handed battle axe for close up : )
I'm still finding Skyrim to be very enjoyable to play.

Happy New Year !!! Everyone ..

http://www.gunandgame.com/forums/attachments/ar15-m16/20158d1238567400-very-technical-m4-vs-m16-question-trajectory.jpg

The angles are exaggerated in the pic but the principle is the same. It's also the same for archery, even archery of old.

The difference between Oblivion and Skyrim is that in Oblivion, it was up to the player to arch the shot by aiming high. In Skyrim, the bow is zeroed in at a set range and the shot arches both realistically and automatically. This means that the arrow doesn't leave the bow above the sites. It leave the bow below the sites, passes up through then back down through again. The distance at which the arrow matches up with the crosshairs on the way down is the set distance by the game. This is done so that a person only has to aim at center of mass for a greater distance and still hit the target. The game doesn't account for hit locations and hitting the person in the foot will yield the same damage as hitting someone in the head. However, that's not to say that you can compensate for distance like you could in Oblivion. It just works a little differently. Instead of simply aiming higher and higher the farther the target is away, in Skyrim you have to get familiar with the zeroed distance. Once you know it, then you can aim high or low depending on if the target is farther or closer than that distance.


I use a bow (IRL). I use 4 pins @ 10 yard increases from 20 to 50. Any closer than 20 and I just use the 20 yard pin since I will only be off by ~2 inches which is good enough for hunting and any farther than 50 and your kinetic energy plus my own personal accuracy drops off to much (I use a 75 lb draw). It's a bow, not a rifle, so 200+ meter shots are out of the question. Now looking at bows way back and how they were used. The idea wasn't sniper accuracy. The idea was to lob the arrows indirectly. You wanted your archers in range of the advancing troops but out of range of their archers. So you get a whole bunch of archers and you cause it to rain arrows upon the advancing troops. Direct fire shots with the bow will be much shorter in range. With the use of the crossbow, direct fire became more feasible because 1. It was easier to aim and 2. The mechanics of it took the strain away from the user, allowing a higher poundage, coupled with a smaller, lighter bolt (instead of arrow) meant a farther, faster moving projectile. Even the crossbows of those days were not as effective as today's compounds. The technology that goes into both the bows and arrows today simply didn't exist then and it makes all the difference.

archery is the best combat in the game. i don't know how much that really means because melee combat is pretty awful and magic is on the unsatisfying side. i had a lot of fun on a stealth archer playthrough though.

I did archery as a hobby when I was younger. And yeah, the vanishing arrows bugged me too. Luckily that was easily fixable. OTOH, the archery isn't quite realistic, but how do you simulate it properly? If we went competely realistic, you need to get rid of the crosshair and have wind affect the flight of your arrow. Should you get damage because your bracer has moved, and your forearm gets whacked by the bowstring? Add variables as desired... Same goes with the melee fighting; the way you use your weapon changes constantly based on what you're fighting, and with what. It would take the character animators a decade to make all the possible animations for that.

The silly flight mechanics and auto-aim for arrows were deliberately added by Beth to make archery easier to grasp for the casual players. And you'll notice in this thread how well that worked. I'm not sure that's entirely a bad thing.



I did notice that, and was pleasantly surprised, but didn't connect it to a particular mod. That's a bit like saying that Beth is now using a companion mod, since they have companions in the game.

I love archery In this game, When I get bored, Ill spawn 30 or So each of Stormcloak and Imperial Archers just to see who can kill the others first

Yes now i use archery and it feels like the real deal with some lethal damage. Though am a melee character its great to have archery as a viable option for hunting animals for food.

I'd agree. It feels solid, but my arrows do seem to go *poof* at a certain range. And after a bit of testing, I don't think it's because I'm not accounting enough for gravity.

I think the point the OP is making is...

name ANY game EVER that had better game mechanics to play as an archer...

Woulda been nice to be able to shoot/attack from horse back though... I know it's a long-standing TES thing... but lets face it... when horses were introduced, horse combat would not have tacked on well. We've got much better systems now. RDR has the best horse riding I've ever seen.

Not only Archery, but all of the combat mechanics simply feel awesome in Skyrim.

The Thief-series, Dark Messiah and Mount & Blade come to mind. Things being easier to hit doesn't mean "better mechanics". The Thief games in particular had your hands starting to shake if you kept the bow drawn for too long, and eventually you'd "un-draw"(my english fails me a bit here) the bow when you got tired enough.

Maybe in the next DLC/expansion there can be a colored/white arc that is visible to the player by choice in order to get more ccuracy. It isn't as precise at low levels, but it could be there in order to predict arc more effectively

If they did that half the forums would be up in arms complaining calling it "dumbing down". Personally over the years Ive seen other titles with predictive arcs, such as golf games. The issue with them is that they either tend to be too accurate therby removing some of the skill required, or they are so innacurate that they are pointless to use and only cause frustration. My view is that the arcing in Skyrim, while a little iffy at first, is easily learned and compenstated for by the player with practice. Since there are no location hitboxes for body sectors then all you have to do is simply hit the target. And for that aiming for center mass is always the best choice, unless its obscured. Once you start doing that the arcing becomes second nature.

the archery is ok, but no way the best. there is no arrowdrop in distance and you actually always hit higher than your aim, no matter how far you are away.

Targeting is a little odd, I must say. I did the practice exercise at Angi's cabin and it took me like 20 arrows to hit the target even though I have 100 archery, Eagle Eye, and was aiming straight at the mark. I guess this is why I keep killing companions.

There is something that could make this game's archery better...

...if i could fire from horseback

I must admit I use a mod to make arrows fly a little faster and further but yes archery is AMAZING in skyrim

Archery combined with sneak and smithing to get the most amount of damage in one shot is awesome. the archery in skyrim is nearly perfect some things could have been better but im not going to go into detail

Unless you tweak the game files yourself, which i linked the youtube video of on page 1, when you fire an arrow it doesnt fire from the centre of your aiming rectangle/crosshair(if your using it that is). Instead the arrow goes higher, above the centre, so if your dont tweak the files, you have to compensate for this yourself, by taking it into account.

AusGamers: Sticking with the mod community for a quick second. Is there anything that you guys added to Skyrim that was taken from Oblivion mods or even Fallout 3 mods that just seemed to work that you guys maybe hadn’t thought of before?

Todd: There’s a bunch, in terms of... it’s nice when they’re creating so many things and then they’re voting so you can see what’s popular. We do look at a lot of the popular ones to see how they change the game balance because that’s fairly easy to do. Sometimes they’re adding dungeons and adventures, so we take less from that, it’s more about how do they change health/damage ratios or this, that and the other.

One of the ones we liked early on in Oblivion is someone made a mod that made the bows a lot more powerful but you couldn’t shoot them as fast. So they just felt better and you felt more powerful instead of shooting over and over. So that was one of the things where “oh, we need to do that in Skyrim; it needs to work like this”. So the bows... the one we show is a lower-end bow -- you can pull them back faster -- but the higher-end bows, they take longer to pull back and when you shoot they do a tonne of damage.



Was it Duke Patrick's Combat Archery mod?

Uldred