Because they decided, screw it, and added unkillable children.
Very few people complain because it's really hard to put forward a pro-child killing argument that doesn’t make everyone look at you weird.

This is a thread about crossbows; can you leave the kids out of the argument?
Thanks

This is a very good idea. I wondered why crossbows were never in years ago when morrowind first came out. I think that if bows are in, crossbows should eventually appear in a xpac of some sort. Crossbows were actually banned when they were first created in real life. The Kings found it a little too nerverecking that anyone of almost no skill could kill them no matter how skilled with a sword he was. I also think they were the first step towards guns getting created. This would be an excellent weapon to add although i think it should get its own skill. Bows will give you less damage but more speed, while crossbows give more damage but slower. Pretty cool if you ask me.

Same with shotguns (called trench guns) in WWI they were considered to brutish a weapon to allow a guy to kill without being all that skilful.

Considering that they are lumping together all one-handed weapons and only differentiating them with perks, they should still go as part of the archery skill.

The problem I have with this is that using a crossbow skillfully pales in comparison to use a bow and arrow skillfully. King Edward III once said: "If you want to train a longbowman, start with his grandfather."
Just about anyone, and I would like to see this, could pick up and fire a crossbow bolt in someone's direction and kill them. You must train yourself as a bow and arrow user from your youth up to be considered practiced. I personally am against the idea of crossbows being a part of a skill for that reason. In my opinion, anyone should be able to pick one up and shoot it, but (for gameplay purposes) reloading speed could be based on something like strength. Just my thoughts.

Modern compound bows are more accurate and have more power compared to compound crossbows, but regardless of what longbow fan boys say, crossbows WERE (in the past) more accurate and had more power (in shorter range) and better range. 100 trained bowman vs 1000 crossbowmen.. the bowmen will win. there are so many different things you could do to give both weapons strengths and flaws. Maybe the crossbow has shorter range and falls to the ground similar to when you don't charge a bow attack. Make the strongest/ heaviest crossbow reloads longer than smaller crossbows and impractical for combating multiple enemies. No enchanted/ enchanting crossbows, even though they do more physical damage, crossbows fall behind enchanted longbows. Earning less experience with crossbows makes sense. I aslo like the throwing spear idea. I personally think crossbows are a really neat weapon, but it would be very easy to implement the ideas i stated with throwing spears (excluding reloading). i hope crossbows are in, but throwing spears are the next best thing.

Not for me. If there are crossbows, I'd like them to *feel* like crossbows, with their strengths AND drawbacks. Their strength as I see it, would be armor penetration as we could have whole bolt of heavy material rather than just the tip (increasing kinetic energy, almost like an APFSDS kinetic penetrator [aka sabot aka KE] they use against tanks now ) For a light and handloaded one, there should be a strenght requirement just to load it, but with less reload time than a machine loaded heavy one.

Unfortunately the way combat (at least used to) work in most situations, I can't see how a more realistic reload time would work out - it would be a one shot weapon before having to switch to close combat. I wonder if we'll even see armor penetration at all, similar to that of damage threshold and hit zones in other games.

I understand your point, but considering the gameplay mechanics if it's a weapon that isn't developing skills, realistically no one other than role-players will use it, the idea that it can only give limited experience sounds more fair then no experience at all.

Unless you want it put somewhere like 2-hand weapons...

In fallout they were coded to be invincible. And I assume Skyrim will be the same way. At the time of Oblivion they probably did not have such an option or did not think of it.


maybe. But in Oblivion I saw no good reason for lack of spears, did you?
I feel that they did not want to make another class of weapons, and then have to make a bunch of models for all the different spears.
Maybe there is a legit reason, but that how it seems to me. And if there is a legit reason they have yet to announce it.

I'm going to say their addition is unlikely, if only by the terrible reasoning that since we've had a very commercially successful game like Oblivion, especially one that brought so many into the Bethesda CRPG fold, they're going to assume that people are less concerned about crossbows, as well as all of the other stuff they cut in the Morrowind to Oblivion transition. I'm guessing that the same thing will happen with the features/mechanics/distinctions we're potentially losing in the migration to Skyrim: traditional spellmaking/enchant, the mysticism school, etc. More likely that they'll stay the way of Divine Intervention, Slowfall, Passwall, Levitation, and Mark and Recall. Or spears and throwing stars, if you prefer. Sad but true.

Crossbows are awesome though, and I could totally see them shoehorning them back in as a weapon of the people (It seems like the sort of weapon a Nord would prefer over a bow, something about the more centralized heft), due to the extra animation experience for that sort of thing they've probably gained with Fallout 3 and the fact crossbows have been steadily appearing in games that aren't just medieval-like Fantasy RPG's. And I think that a longer "reload" time, coupled with the possible rarity of bolts and the mechanism itself that you could even better explain by its absence as a choice in Oblivion, would more than allow them to account for balance issues. M'aiq might have to bite his sandpapery tongue, though:

"Some people want special bows that take too long to load and need special arrows called bolts. M'aiq thinks they are idiots."

Just watched Robin Hood (with Max Von Syndow), there was Friar Tuck, dual-wielding Crossbows.

I didn't think about this. It might make sense, just for the sake of gaining experience to level to have it fall into two handed weapon category. But I don't like the sound of it really. It would be nice if you didn't necessarily need to be gaining experience for a skill to level your entire character up. Just for the sake of using a weapon that doesn't fall into it's own skill. I suppose I would need to think about it some more and take more data into account, data I don't have about how the leveling system actually works in Skyrim.

I'd actually say Morrowind's implementation of them was pretty half-hearted at best, there was much less variety than with longbows in the game, and I don't think there was a single artifact crossbow in the game. And really, all that set them apart from normal bows was that they reloaded slower and their minimum damage was the same as the maximum, meaning that you didn't need to hold down the attack button for a certain period of time to fire more powerful shots, that, and they used bolts, of course.

Now, I don't feel this justifies them being removed, because I don't like the "It was done poorly, so it should be removed." mentality, if something wasn't done very well in a past game, the solution should be to improve it, not remove it. But since Bethesda apparently applied that logic for other things as well, I can sort of see why crossbows were removed, when one considers it in that light.

But I don't really have strong feelings on crossbows. It would be nice if they were added in, but in games that have them, they generally become that weapon type I almost never used, I might use them a few times just to see what it's like, but for the most part, I'll probably stick with bows. And if they're not in the game, meh, I don't feel that it's any big loss, and in fact, I'd be rather annoyed if we got crossbows but no spears, because spears I actually care about.

i like them being that "think that i CANT STAND, but adds variety to the people i see ingame"



I'M GONNA KILL YOU NOW!

Theres no point to not including them...

Would love them, but just like spears Bethesda has decided to just leave it out from any elder scrolls game we will ever see in the future I guess. Its sad, but its nothing we can do. I still think Skyrim will be awesome

They're already pretty much confirmed not to be in, else Todd Howard wouldn't have emphasized how regular bows have become much slower and more powerful in Skyrim.

Cross bows should inflict more damage and be easier to aim than bows, but they should be heavier, much louder, and take significantly longer to reload than bows do.