I agree. The beauty of a single player game is that your choice of play style in no way hampers someone else.

That is how bows usually work in videogames, sure.

Realistically an arrow would rarely cause an instant-death, or even an injury that would be imminently fatal. Giving whoever you hit enough time and oppertunity to alert others.

Additionally it would require a great deal more skill and practise to shoot accurately with a bow than with a rifle, and with the option to mod silencers unto your weapons you could still take down enemies quietly.

Why exactly bows are not used in the Fallout universe i couldn't tell you. Maybe there is a lore reason for it, or maybe it's just Bethesda saying "Skyrim = medieval weapons, Fallout = Modern weapons". Both with their respective exegeration/fantast aspect to it, like plasma rifles in Fallout and magical Staves in Elderscrolls.

As of now we have not seen anything that could be considered a bow in Fallout 4, and we didn't in Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas either. And if they aren't in yet, at this point they won't be seeing how close we are to release. But you could always hope they secretly are, or that future dlc/mods add them.

I really don't understand the whole "This is Fallout, not Skyrim/Oblivion/TES" argument. New Vegas had spears. It doesn't get much more basic than that. Fallout 3 had swords. And I'm not talking about the shishkebab.

There are also raiders that use baseball bats, pool cues, and many other forms of weaponry that are strictly inferior to both guns and bows.

It's not like we're giving the Sole Survivior access to dragon shouts or something. They're bows and arrows, a form of weaponry people use to effectively hunt game, even today.

In a world that has caused society to 'go tribal,' primitive weapon types are fine. This whole "TESification" sentiment is borderline ridiculous.

Are you joking? In real life they cause terrible damage! Being shot by an arrow causes massive hemorrhaging and imminent death.

Bows and crossbows and explosive/improvised bolts and arrows would fit Fallout world very well. Especially the whole "scrapper" aspect of the Wasteland in finding things and making weapons out of them. Such a weapon would make a perfect fit.

Afterall, we have had melee weapons, unarmed weaons, and throwing weapons.

I'd love it with my tactical stealth character. Imagine mechanized bows that mechanically increase string tension after you pull the string back to increase penetration.

Imagine arrows that emit plasma around the head to deal energy damage or pulse with electricity or create a short range EMP field to deal massive damage to robots.

Imagine a sniper arrow that when locked on to a target using the bows scope will, to some degree, hone in on its target and change trajectory in mid air to hit its mark.

I could go on with the possibilities of how versatile a bow/crossbow/auto-crossbow could be. But they would be far from useless, at least in the hands of a player that is capable of using them.

If your wanting to talk about realism have you ever heard a silenced gun in real life? You can still hear them if your within 50 feet of them.

Where (exactly) is your explosive going to be placed?

wow, ironically you are the first person to actually give me optimism that crossbows will be in the game. The mention of DLC reminded me that Beth went to some trouble to get crossbows in Skyrim. We found "parts" (clues) of that in the vanilla game hidden in the CK and hardcode when the game and CK was first released. They likely just ran out of time (like with horse combat) and once they had more time (while working on the Dawngaurd) they got the crossbows working in the game.

After all that trouble of finally getting it to work in their gamebryo based engine, I would now not be surprised if now crossbows are in Fallout 4.

As far as the benefits over a gun...

I have used crossbows in RL "sport" battles (using blunt plastic tips and with up to 1000 inch pound draw ) for over 30 years. But I never considered how the crossbow might in any situation have an advantage over a "gun". So this is really just off the top of my head:

Ammo can be immediately reused.

Bullets have vastly more kinetic force but bolts/arrows have more momentum (bullets can punch thru a target taking a lot of their energy with them bolts tend to inflict push more). Not sure how that would be of any use however as the push from a bolt on a living target is not all that much anyway.

There is one advantage that is not often thought of by laymen however and I have use it to win a few fights. This advantage could be the deciding factor against a person with a gun in some circumstances.

And that is that a arrow / bolt can curve over obstacles.

I would rather have a gun than a bow in a fight, but then I would rather have an AK-47 than a Raven Arms MP-25 in a fight as well. Sometimes you do not get to choose what your weapon is and have to use tactics to overcome and win (that can be fun to you know).

So for the same reason I would not want to see all the "poor" guns types removed from the game I would indeed like to see crossbows in the game!

No i am not joking. An arterial bleed can take upto several minutes before blood loss is serious enough to induce loss of conciousness. And for that you would have to hit some of the bigger/more significant arteries, like the aorta, the carotid, pelvic branches to each leg, those kind of arteries.

And by applying proper pressure bleeding out can be delayed significantly, and even completely halted. Severing but a single carotid artery and appling pressure to close it off would not neccesarily lead to loss of conciousness as there are 3 more arteries that supply the brain.

An arrow to the heart or the brain could be fatal almost instantaneous. Anywhere else the victim is likely to be alive, and potentially mobile, for quite some time. Certainly more than enough to alert every other guard in the immediate viscinity, and certainly nothing like the videogame version of bow and arrow where enemies just instantly drop dead.

Doesn't mean a bow and arrow aren't potentially fatal, but it's not realistically a weapon of choice to attempt to incapacitate guards and prevent alarms from being raised.

Yah realistically firearms are not as instant-death as they are portrayed either, or as quiet when silenced.

This isn't all about realism, someone just said that bows would make great ranged stealth takedown weapons. And in videogame logic this is certainly true, realistically not even close.

Then i commented that if he wants stealth and ranged weapons, there are silencers. Which according to videogame/movie lore are 100% effective. Just like the bow.

cool. this iz a great discussion.

plus some very awesome arrow ideaz

Realism in a game where I'm going to PUNCH hordes of maniacs armed with automatic weapons to death...........

Please don't use that word lol.

Couple of clarifying points about silencers.

Not all silencers work, or are manufactured the same way. Yes I've heard different silencers in action, most of them just muffle the sound instead of trying to damp it completely out but that's because the more baffling your build into the silencer for quiet, the more you Decrease muzzle velocity and accuracy when the shot leaves the barrel. That being said there are still professionally manufactured silencers for some weapons that damp the shot out so effectively your more likely to hear the bolt of the weapon cycling than the actual shot.

Crossbows aren't "bows" in the traditional sense. They were developed to deal with a specific defense, plate armor, and left the battlefields pretty much around the time that full coverage body armor stopped being used on the battlefield. The only drawback to them was they took an extraordinary amount of time to rewind and set for the next shot. In some cases it took more time to reset a bolt than to reload a musket, hence the gradual switch from crossbows to muskets.

A bow in the hands of a practiced and experienced archer is one of the most lethal things that you could imagine running into, in the close effective ranges the energy transfer of an arrow can rival that of most handguns, but the lethal part is that instead of a target having a small chuck of lead buried in the bottom of a wound, you now have a target with a shaft up to 3 feet in length lodged in their body causing further trauma and damage with every move they make.

You will occasionally see spec-ops teams that keep a crossbow in inventory for specific purposes, but you don't see them with bows hanging on the wall because most of Them couldn't hit themselves with a bow, much less another target. Why is this? Because it can take up to a year of constant practice and training to be able to consistently hit the torso of a man sized target at 100 yards with a bow. Don't believe that? Look it up, under the requirements of the British crown when longbowmen were mustered for the crusade forces.