User blog comment:Deus Gladiorum/What should be in the next Skyrim update?/@comment-4057437-20120711073637/@comment-2060279-20120712161316

The English longbow isn't in the game, but the longbow still is and I'll assume it was modeled on the English longbow. Of course humans killed Mammoths, however they did so in groups. My point is that there is clearly something wrong with a single person being able to do so on his own, but that's not something hindering my gameplay experience.

I'm aware that Skyrim is trying to be realistic, and thanks for the English lesson, but as I said before realism only works when it doesn't make a game tedious. And the limited range of a bow doesn't make the game challenging, it makes it tedious. Yesterday I performed a few tests with an ebony bow. I was able to hit a tree multiple times with a 3 in. grouping from 100m away, but from 70m away I couldn't hit a target that was still within draw distance because my arrows kept clipping through him.

And I doubt that the physics of our universe applies to a universe in which magic exists. Shouldn't a traveling projectile like an icebolt still be susceptible to gravity? Projectiles decelerate as they travel, but they don't dissipate after traveling a certain distance; they will have either reached a target or they will have hit the ground first.

The visuals in Skyrim are there because they're aesthetically pleasing. They don't add an unnecessary annoyance to the game, and that's what make the world believable. But what completely destroys the believability of a game is when something completely unrealistic happens, something that defies either the lore or the understood physics of a game. When an arrow completely clips through a target, that is one of those moments.