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I know this game takes place in a universe with firearms. It sounds like the firearms will be difficult to use, but effective against magic-users. As neat as it sounds, will we still have good old fashioned archery with bows and arrows, crossbows and bolts, etc? If we do, how will it be handled? I'm not trying to be rude, but archery tends to not to be very good in most RPG's. I know it was terrible on the Aurora Engine, which is what the Neverwinter Nights games were made with. I know most people tend not to like archery because it tends to not be as accessible as melee, so I imagine game designers don't put much effort into archery for the next game since most players didn't go for it for the last one, which in turn drives away more potential archers, and it's just a downward spiral. 1) I was wondering if the folks at Project Eternity were planning to try to make archery more appealing to players? 2) I was also wondering about ammunition. Most games like NWN and WOW made you have arrows on you at all times. If you run out of arrows, you cannot fire with the bow. This makes it realistic, but it can be a little stressful since arrows often miss and you can't retrieve them. You always have to buy them instead of being able to make them, so every time you fire an arrow you see is little pieces of gold or silver flying away from the target. You can overstock to decrease the chance of running out, but then they take up tons of space in your pack and it's just stressful. I know I often use melee weapons just to avoid stressing about running out of arrows, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. 3) On the other hand, Dragon Age gives us unlimited ammunition with regular arrows; just limited amo for enchanted arrows like fire or ice arrows. I know it isn't realistic to have a quiver of unlimited arrows, but it also relieves the stress of running out of arrows or space in the pack by over-stocking. I was wondering if anyone would be interested in something like that? 4) If not, maybe a retrieval method? I know most games let us find random arrows in random places, but we only tend to find a handful at a time (6 here, 14 there), which runs out very fast. If we don't have unlimited arrows like in DA, I was wondering if we could retrieve most arrows we loose. For example, we shoot at a bandit and manage to fire 6 arrows into him by the time he goes down. When we loot his corpse, we find those 6 arrows + whatever randomly generated loot he already had. 5) Also, if memory serves, in NWN2 we could craft and enchant most weapons... but not as well with bows or arrows. While we could craft or enchant incredible armor, weapons, magical items, etc. if memory serves, we were limited with what we could do with our bows, and we couldn't craft or enchant arrows at all, which just increased our dependency on merchants or random luck. So basically, my questions and/or suggestions are this: -Will archery be about as strong as melee attacks in P:E so it won't be seen as weaker? -Will loosed arrows do a similar amount of damage as the swings of swords of a similar tier? -Will we have unlimited ammunition like in DA games or limited like in NWN games? -If we have limited ammunition, could we be able to retrieve (some of) the arrows we loose? -Could we be able to craft our own arrows so we don't have to worry about buying them all? -Could we be able to craft and/or enchant bows and arrows just as well as melee weapons? -Could we be able to buy cheap, regular arrows and enchant them ourselves so we don't have to pay for expensive enchanted arrows or wait to filch them off enemy bodies? So, discussion time. Do you like archery? Are you looking forward to playing it in P:E? Are there any ways archery has been handled in past games that you like? Do you have any suggestions for archery in P:E? Do you like how archery has been handled in most games and think I need to give this a rest? What are some of your preferences in all of this? I'm just asking because I love archery and I would like to see it handled well in this game.

I would love to play an archer, but I have yet to find a cRPG that makes long-range combat sufficiently "meaty". What do I mean? Impact of missiles should mean more than HP damage. I'm thinking as a minimum bracing animations, the regaining of balance by taking a step back. After a couple of hits, the target should look like a pincushion. I dislike vanishing arrows! I also dislike moderate damage dealing, rapid firing archers. That's boring. Arrows should be lethal to unarmored targets, but next to useless against plate armor and shields (that's what crossbows are for). At the same time, archers are dead meat in melee combat. To sum up, having an archer in the party should not feel like a permanent AoE DoT spell.