Anyone else remember at E3, or thereabouts, Bethesda said there are longbows.

And shortbows.

And there is a difference in how they work? Shortbows did more damage/less reload, and longbows vice versa?

Um... What happened?

Note: May not actually have been at E3. But they definitely said such a thing in the lead up to release.

I don't remember there being any official talk about it, just fan speculation because we saw a bow was called 'long bow', which some early-on bows indeed are called.. :mellow:

Bugger. That's lame. I was really hoping they'd actually made inroads with the ranged weapon for non magic users in this game.

Apparently not.

Still. DLC is always a hope.

beth is oddly committed to zero variety in your choice of ranged weapons. its just a damage increase; no shortbows, longbows, that other kind of bow that REALLY had no reason to vanish from the face of nirn after morrowind...

So having perk tree that let's you specialise into a high damage mobile ranger, a stealthy sniper, or a precision marksman (or a combination of the three) - not to mention the fact you can play in 3rd person and still HIT things, and can bash enemies to give you some defence in melee is nothing but chopped liver for the archers of the world, what really matters to you is a shortbow? =p

WRONG
There are longbows in the game but since you haven't seen them yet then I suppose they don't exist.
I haven't seen shortbows though....

Technically he is correct. From what I've observed, the different bows are essentially just different skins on the same concept. I haven't seen that hunting bows do added damage at the expense of added draw time or anything at all.


Let's just waltz over to the UESP wiki, shall we?

Let's see now.

Under Melee weapons, you have swords, axes and maces, all of which have a specific function and differ from each other in the way they work. Swords have greater speed but less damage, maces have the most damage but least speed, and axes fall in between.

Meanwhile over in destruction magic, you have fire, frost and lightning, which do added damage to health, stamina and magicka respectively.

That's the point I'm making. Ranged weapons you have bows, and they appear to have different skins and different ranks, but essentially all provide the same basic function.

"WRONG" again it seems. Just because a thing is called a longbow doesn't make it a longbow. You should remember that well before taking your money out of your pocket - especially this century. While I can concede that there is a children's bow in the game which is labelled as a "longbow", the simple fact that it does not require years of training to use (preferably from early childhood) and that instead of being one of the most powerful bows in the game it is one of the weakest, it definitely isn't a longbow at all - not by a long shot [pun alert].
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Having said this, I find myself in two minds about changing such things because, I suppose, it can be argued that in life we all too often encounter things that are not as documented (if not being the opposite of what is documented). For example: lignin vanilin, the substance we have a taste for when we are short on a certain group of anti-oxidants, is called "imitation vanilla" in deference to a long standing commercial substitute based on the vanilin bean which has no nutritional value whatsoever and ergo, is the fake vanilla of the two. It is a challenge worthy of the gods and goddesses to find, in our presently shameful state of trade practices, any product labelled as "vanilla" which is not meagrely "brandy" flavoured - or worse still; plain! This problem is so severe that in forums like this one, people use the name of one of the world's most powerful food flavourings to connote the state of being unmodified or plain!
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In this sense, having a "longbow" in the game which is anything but a longbow strikes me as being a highly relevant statement about the present state of the market in which the game is being sold. I could not agree more - although I think this statement might have been emboldened by the addition of a powerful bow as tall as the player that required mastery or, as a bare minimum, expert bowmanship to wield and, was labeled as a "shortbow" or a "child's bow"...
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This will, no doubt, provide ample ammunition for users of the Creation Kit when it comes out in January...
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[EDIT]Spelling (ego/ergo) - probably courtesy of no keyboard buffer[/EDIT]

you naaabs. i made a thread about this few hours ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TorcRKAQXLU

look they do make a difference, just not excatly sure what are the variables.

Word.

Yeah...they said some BS about concentrating on making the weapons in the game feel good instead of putting in multiple types. Uh so what is exactly that much different from Oblivion in terms of weapon usage other than finishing moves? Where are my spears, crossbows, and throwing weapons? Lol I would accept a blow dart that fires out one projectile like the traps for some variation. Just poison the thing.

Game is great and all but still. Weapon variation would kind of be great. There should be mauls, one handed hammers, shortswords with different swing speeds from longswords, Spears, Flails would be asking too much I think, crossbows, staves that can hit things, non-letal take down methods, throwing weapons, horse combat without the horse attacking everything without your hearsay, ffs horses are much better but damned if the thing is does not think it is superman. Granted that is asking a lot but just a few of those things would go a long way I think. There should not be fewer weapon choices every installment.

Did I mention i still love the game?

Lol

The thing is, the perk trees in Skyrim don't actually require any choice other than 'which would you like to be first?' because within a few hours it's pretty easy to get most of the perks on both sides of any split in the tree, especially with archery.

Levels are easy to gain and there is so many of them you can eventually max anything you want without having to really make any binding gameplay decisions.

Dark Souls had lots of awesome bows

this is where enchanting comes in

You mean you want that longbow that spans over than 5 foot? The one that English Longbowmen use back in the day?

Or at least it would, if the variety in melee weapons was because of enchantments.

But its not. To annoy Realm Eleven, vanilla melee weapons have more variation than ranged weaponry does.

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That's the one...

The term longbow refers more to the shape than the length (yes, I know that doesn't make much sense), which can vary greatly. There are two longbows in the game: The one labeled longbow and the Forsworn bow. The rest are more or less recurve bows (albeit somewhat unrealistic). A short bow, sometimes called a horse bow, is used primarily for horseback archery. Since we can't shoot from horseback, there really is no need for them.

the bane of this series i think is the lack of weapon variation hopefully they mend that in the next game.

Honestly this would actually fix the epic fail that is smithing for a traditional bow user. If they made the bows crafted under the 'light armor' side of smithing the short bows that did less damage and had less range but made up for it by being lighter/easier to sneak with and had a faster shooting animation and made the bows on the heavy armor side of smithing your long bows that did more damage and had more range but were more difficult to sneak with and took longer to fire then archers wouldn't feel so penalized/forced when it came to choosing what type of armor they wanted to be able to craft.

I really want to know why the English Longbow has taken on such a mythical power.

It took me three months of training one summer to be decent with an 90lb draw longbow. The hardest part being to the simple strength training to actually draw and hold that much. (I would be using a heavier bow, but moved to a city where access to suitable training areas was kind of lacking.) Hardly needed 'years' of training from a little kid. Skeletal deformation isn't a requirement to draw massive longbows, it is a side-effect of doing it for years from a young age.

The longbow is also a very inefficient design. It wastes a huge amount of energy as it has an uneven power curve. That is why designs like the basic recurve were so popular: They allowed more energy to be transmitted into the arrow using a lower total draw weight. Why? Because their power curve stays higher throughout more of their draw-travel.


What is the advantage of the longbow? They are easier to make and remain safe. They are a natural composite bow, without the requirements of glues, which in the era they were used were questionable and unreliable. And more advanced bows required far longer to make, far more skill and knowledge, and more resources. (And due to the glues uses, where more prone to breaking.) England is a wet place, so trying to rely on a bow made with any kind of glue was kind of out of the question. The English didn't use the longbow because it was technically superior in anyway, they are actually very inferior, but because they were the only way to produce a powerful bow that wouldn't break.



I'm an archer, bowyer, and fletcher, and honestly I missed crossbows, javelins, and slings far more than I did other 'bows'. And even then I never once was sneaking around in game trying to stealth kill people and found myself thinking "Wow, I really wish I had a short bow".

I play an in game archer, I do feel its a shame there isnt more variety in ranged weapons. Would of been nice to have the long bow do crazy damage but take ages to pull, and a crossbow being good for assassinations, then the shortbow good for combat mid and close range. I do kind of have some variety with arrow type. I dont buy arrows, I use what I find, so with 400 or so steel and ancient Nord arrows, they tend to be for fodder, although lately I have a ton of Orcish arrows. Then tougher enemies or landed dragons get glass/ebony/Deadric.

A short bow is a short bow... Just because it is SOMETIMES used for horseback riding doesn't mean that is it's only option and there for only for that.
I used a steak knife for spreading butter before, it doesn't become a butter knife and only for butter from then on due to that reason.
All people do is complain about immersion into the game, I feel different weapon types is HUGELY part of that experience.

Btw they need to implement horseback archery!!

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That would be because history is meagrely politically convenient myth with a sprinkling of facts to make it sound convincing - and the prowess of the longbow (and the required training) is a matter of history as opposed to fact. Maybe I should take my own advice! I think you make some great points and the fact that it took you three months to get yourself up to speed with a longbow seems relevant. Would bowmanship take three game-months to master? The point being that, of all the bows, the longbow would have to be one that would require, as a minimum, master-level skill to use at all.
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As to the power curve of a longbow, that would boil down to the material and the manufacturing process. This is the bit where I get to say that, at least as far as historical sources recount the power of the longbow, we can't really be certain unless we have the knowhow to authentically reproduce the design and the technique exactly. I suspect that dredging up the recipe for authentic block chocolate would be easier. This still concedes your point - just not entirely.
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You mentioned problems with glues in the manufacture of compound bows - I would have assumed that the main structural reinforcement would have been whipping - with glue only to initially hold things together long enough for them to be whipped (i.e. in the way that guides are attached to fishing rods)....?

There actualy is, somewhat anyway. The long bow and hunting bow actually have a quicker draw time then other bows. With the 50% stagger perk this makes them pretty deadly at mid-close range.