Board Thread:Lore Discussion/@comment-24077826-20131022163635/@comment-24590102-20140406065252

You can't hit a target with a bow using only sound (sometimes absent) or smells (too slow). Infrared is also unreliable (i.e. pea soup in humid conditions) and tends to become vague because a moving target leaves a thermal trail which makes the the target look bigger than it is. Echo location might work, however, it's prone to a lot of ghosting in the kind of enclosed spaces the Falmer inhabit and would favour an open-air environment.

The in-game sources which claim the Falmer are blind happen to be speculative (i.e. do not specify how the conclusion is drawn). Moreover, if the Falmer were blind, they wouldn't invest any effort in making bows, for their own use, because bows would be useless to them unless they used them with echolocation in a strictly outdoors setting which avoided narrow canyons, etc. The Falmer's accurate use of bows in enclosed spaces is only possible if they have much more than echolocation to pinpoint their target and neither infrared nor sense of smell can help, here, because the response is too slow and the resolution insufficient for targeting. Moreover, Falmer helmets are made for Falmer who have the use of their eyes because when you put one on, you can still see out. Why go to the trouble of making view ports in the face-guard of the helmet? Additionally, why take the unnecessary risk? The reason a Falmer helmet is designed not to obstruct vision, once again, can only be because the Falmer are not blind.

As for game mechanics, there is no problem here. Bows could have been excluded and Falmer Helmets could have been made unequippable if the thought of blinding the player while equipped was too much for the developers to stomach (and, given the "Boots of Blinding Speed" item, offered in Morrowind, I doubt this would be the case). So, dare I say, this is not a matter of design limitation, it's an exercise in drawing your own conclusions.

The blindness of the Falmer is an in-game myth built on an in-game conjecture (a hypothesis which is partly based on a non-factual premise) which turns out to be wrong. This is, in my view, a very realistic representation because it is extremely rare for conjectures to be true due to the very low reliability of non-factual premises upon which a conjecture must be partly based (otherwise it would be an inference).

