I haven't played too many FPSes, partly because they give me motion sickness and partly because realistic guns aren't something I'm interested in. Grappling hook guns and freeze rays that you use in a puzzley way, sure! Bullets just seem kinda boring though. But anyway I was playing Skyrim and I had some fun sniping with my bow and arrow. The fact that I was shooting things from a distance while holding still instead of fighting them up close and maybe spinning around in the process seemed to be gentler on my motion sickness too. So, I just wanted to hear of other games where archery works similar to that in Skyrim. Though I could do without constantly running short on good arrows or having to hunt for them in the brush, lol.
If anyone has any thoughts on designing a game where a bow is the main weapon, I'd love to hear them.
I want to help design a "sandpark" MMO. Optional interactive story with quests and deeply characterized NPCs, plus sandbox elements like player-craftable housing and lots of other crafting. If you are starting a design of this type, please PM me. I also love pet-breeding games.
there was a Zelda game that had an area where you did exactly that, but if you want to go for a full game i would recommend deus ex.
You don't use bow and arrow but rather sniper-gear, but the experience is quite the same.
Close combat is something that you will find yourself in now and then though, with me it usually means i die and will have to start from my last save :P
Team Fortress 2 is free to play and Sniper has a Bow weapon, with a simple charge fire mechanism that affects the dmg and accuracy, and drops your movement speed while charging
If I were to design a game where archery was the focus, I'd make the make character skill up into basically being a super accurate Lars Anderson. Long story short: ancient archers held multiple arrows in the shooting hand and used their fingers to rearrange and knock each shot, instead of drawing only single arrows from a quiver each time.
This video shows the how of it:
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and this video talks about the history a bit (you'll want to pause to read passages):
Best FPS archery and magic is Darkfall Online. It's like hexen meets shadowbane. It was the best combat I've ever played, just the grind and other problems were bad with the game. But the ship building and naval combat was equally epic.
It was full loot open world pvp with regional control. You could siege or be sieged for control of towns, cities, outposts. You could form alliances. But definitely the most epic combat ever.
Both archery and magic were FPS while melee was 3rd person. You could even shoot bows under water....
This guy was one of the best known archers...there was a specialization called "mage killer" for your bow that did a lot more damage to people holding a staff (both while fighting or when they try to heal) and hitting someone in the back (anytime, with arrows or spells or melee) did 50% more damage than hitting in the front(like when they're running away trying to heal you just rape them) the tradeoff for the archer was only utility and healing spells and buffs.
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When his screen turns white for a minute, or gets covered in red stringy stuff, those are "blind" spells that blind your opponent if you can land it on them. The length of time they're blinded depends on the person's magic level.
Parrying actually deflected tons of damage but drained stamina and most fights came down to who had more control of their stats, running out of stamina was as bad as running out of health. Heal spells and potions healed over time, so you couldn't just pot up to full life, you had to plan ahead and you could cycle 3 spells, mana to stamina, health to mana, stamina to health, and potentially keep them all up to keep you fighting if you cycle them often enough while not getting hit or dying.
Sea towers were battles over a "sea tower" that awarded tons of stuff to the capper once per day. The ships are all built by players with LOTS of wood. If someone boards your ship and kills you all they can take the ship.
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Towards the end in ^^ it shows underwater archery which was so cool. But it really shows the intensity of a 3 way battle in the game. When you die a gravestone appears and you spawn naked back at whatever bind stone you bound to, which was far far far away from the sea tower where you die, so you're out of the conflict when you die, it created intensity I haven't seen in another game since. At the end of the video you can see hundreds of player graves, and for the people still alive the graves are filled with everything the dead player had in their inventory which was always top of the line gear.
If I were to design a game where archery was the focus, I'd make the make character skill up into basically being a super accurate Lars Anderson.
[...snip...]
THIS. Freakin this.
It looks like another example of reality is stranger than fiction, or in this case, definitely cooler than fiction. It's almost forgivable in certain multiplayer games where balancing may come into play and not allow this sort of power to be obtained, but it seems only lacking in research that single player games like Skyrim don't allow things like this.
Edit: Interesting the comments on the 2nd video, from the 2nd video's author about historical accuracy:
