Not to be confused with The Straight and Arrow Path. ![]() Subtrope of Bows and Errors and Guns Do Not Work That Way. Early first-person shooters with fantasy weapons avoid gravity effects entirely the fights take place at such close range that the computations involved are generally not worth the processing time. Games with larger maps and with a higher focus on realism, however, don't use hitscan weapons and do require the player to take both bullet travel time and bullet drop into account while firing at long range. This is generally an Acceptable Break from Reality, since most of the time players would be shooting targets that aren't far away enough that compensating for gravity is needed. The vast majority of First-Person Shooters play the trope straight, treating anything that shoots bullets as a hitscan weapon. See Wreaking Havok for more on how video games avert this. For games that do incorporate this, the technique of arcing is often used as a skill challenge and to make the player feel personally competent. And even if the consoles are powerful enough, depending on the design of the game this sometimes isn't incorporated if it detracts from the enjoyment of the game - after all, it's a game, not a physics simulation. It's only since around the Seventh Generation that consoles have gotten powerful enough to do this consistently without affecting gameplay (wasting all of the CPU power on physics and leaving none for the actual GAME wouldn't be a good thing). Keeping track of proper physics for projectiles like arrows is CPU-intensive. This trope is often used in video games due to technical and/or resource limitations. Dispersion is often much greater in archery (especially the preindustrial kind), due to greater variation from shot to shot in the bow, the arrow, the bowstring, and the draw of the bow. Like firearms, arrows suffer from dispersion, which is to say that the exact same weapon firing the same ammunition with the same aim will land the arrow in a slightly different place. Grenades, including those fired from Grenade Launchers, seem to be the one kind of projectile that near-universally avert this, even in video games that use hitscan for most firearms. Even then one must also take the difference in altitude into account, not to mention the wind. This is arguably their main feature as anyone can aim for a head at 400 meters through a good scope estimating the distance, and hence the drop, is the tricky bit. Sniper scopes have a knob to adjust the distance (among other things). If the enemy is 400 meters away, one needs already to aim way above the head. Going beyond this limit, however, will cause an increasingly rapid drop of the bullet's path. At distances up to this (ammunition-specific) limit, the deviation of the bullet's path from the straight scope-line-of-sight is less than about 5 cm/2 in., so it can be ignored. For firearms, the sight is calibrated for a specific distance, 200 meters for an assault rifle, for instance. Just as other tropes have transferred from the archer to the Cold Sniper, we find this can happen for firearms. Contrast that with Rain of Arrows where this trope will be averted with gusto when fired by a large faceless military unit and where it is now cool to obey the laws of physics. This is often also ignored because the trope tends to occur when trying to emphasize the archer ideal wobbles and arcs that make the Arrow Cam face up at the blank sky don't help that. Real arrows don't: they bend back and forth and also spin, the direction determined by the angle of the fletching (the feathers at the rear end of the arrow, though most are now plastic). If the arrow is shown in a close-up or slow-motion, it will always travel straight as, well, an arrow. On one hand, we have bullets and arrows that are shot straight across the battlefield and still don't fall on the ground halfway through, and scopes with the sole purpose of compensating for the screen's inferior resolution, while on the other hand, if a video game does try to portray archery realistically, often the angle stays the same regardless of the distance, so we have archers shooting upwards to hit targets right in front of them, which really should result in the arrow flying over the target. This is often portrayed on screen incorrectly: the angle often stays the same regardless of the distance. In Real Life, group archers would fire massive volleys of arrows which functioned as a form of indirect fire, much like modern artillery. Likewise, archers will shoot at an angle, somewhat upwards. ![]() Therefore, while it makes sense to shoot horizontally at point-blank range (which is the literal meaning of "point blank"), the shooter usually needs to fire above the target. ![]() Projectiles, like all matter, are subject to gravity. Daenlin, owner of the shop "The Archer's Paradox", The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
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