Examples of FPArchery ala Skyrim?

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

And let's not forget the Thief series - the original range of stealth archery simulator.

Mount & Blade Warband (among other M&B releases).

It has both first person and 3rd person view. Archery is easier with first person camera (imo).

Or you could try Oblivion too.

Sniper Elite. The game specifically makes you very weak at close range, forcing you to shoot the enemies from the longer range.

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:

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.

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.

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:

mkcfy 1 day ago

Arab Archery supports his technique yes, my video is basically invalid at this point.

Minecraft has a bow where the range and accuracy increase the longer you hold fire.

Lars Andersen's technique is awesome to watch but I'm not sure it would actually make for fun gameplay; at some point it wouldn't be any different form having a gun with your handful of arrows being a limited clip of bullets.

Yep, i think that games like Skyrim don't allow that for balancing purposes. Either you nerf the damage and make it fast, or make it slow and powerful (actually, Todd Hodward himself said that they purposely made archery slower and more powerful than Oblivion).

Lars Andersen's technique is awesome to watch but I'm not sure it would actually make for fun gameplay; at some point it wouldn't be any different form having a gun with your handful of arrows being a limited clip of bullets.

What about running with that? "Bullet time" with a very limited 'clip' is something we've got a lot of examples of, and the aesthetic (setting, sound, etc.) and feel (range, physics, etc.) could be very different. Honestly, current archery models in games are only distinguishable from single-action manual loading rifles in those very ways (aesthetics and physics). So...maybe it's not so bad? :)

There are a good number of fantastic/thematic tricks characters perform with arrows that really don't work with bullets, like pinning enemies to walls, quickly building a step ladder the character can use to climb, and other actions that depend on the fact that an arrow has a meaningful length dimension to it. Think Green Arrow and Hawkeye. Actually, both of those characters also used fancy hi-tech arrows, which would explode into nets or smoke or other things. Arrows are also retrievable and nigh silent...when hitting fleshy targets anyway.

Man, there's a lot you can do here, haha. :)

The Thief series, Elder Scrolls series, Pirates, Vikings & Knights 1&2, Savage 1&2 are some good archery FP games.. These are practically the only games that have decent archery physics in them

Then I guess it's my job to mention Dark Messiah Might and Magic, which pretty much trumps every other archery FPS with the exception of Mount and Blade: Warband.

Deathmatch was a blast:

As much as I loved Thief, Dark Messiah did a better job than most in getting across just what it was like to be pierced by a high-speed shaft of wood. THUNK...

Good examples. I didn't think to mention examples (derp) ...I'll add Chivarly and War of the Roses to the mix; the latter in particular has an interesting presentation on ranged combat (while the other one has reasonable archery and far better melee, imho).

Dark Messiah Might and Magic, which pretty much trumps every other archery FPS

Maybe it's just cause I haven't played the games and I'm only basing this on watching those videos - but that doesn't appear significantly different from how, say Skyrim did archery. Could you explain what is the principal differences between the games you posted and say something like Skyrim? I'm honestly interested in other approaches to archery. Best idea would be to try those games I suppose, when I get a chance.

I know of some semi-realistic aiming games, like America's Army that put a lot of emphasis on things like controlling your breathing when shooting. I don't know how well that goes over with the general gaming crowd, but I wonder if it can be applied to an archery game too.

Dark Messiah Might and Magic, which pretty much trumps every other archery FPS

Maybe it's just cause I haven't played the games and I'm only basing this on watching those videos - but that doesn't appear significantly different from how, say Skyrim did archery. Could you explain what is the principal differences between the games you posted and say something like Skyrim? I'm honestly interested in other approaches to archery. Best idea would be to try those games I suppose, when I get a chance.

I know of some semi-realistic aiming games, like America's Army that put a lot of emphasis on things like controlling your breathing when shooting. I don't know how well that goes over with the general gaming crowd, but I wonder if it can be applied to an archery game too.

When you're playing Skyrim, pull out your bow. Or any weapon for that matter. Now look down. You're a disembodied set of hands. Most of the archery FPS games I prefer have total body awareness; your arms, legs, and body are rendered fully in first person, giving you a much more immediate sense of awareness. Dark Messiah and Mount and Blade both do this (Thief was the innovator here).

Secondly. In Skyrim, arrow/body physics are awful. If a mage is running full-bore at you, you can put an arrow in his eye and he'll just keep coming. He'll just wail on you at full strength until his health drops to zero, when he drops dead as an arrow porcupine. I'm sorry; I don't care if you're a demigod, but if you get an arrow in the eye, or face, or neck, you are going down, dead or not. Dark Messiah and Mount and Blade both do damage in relation to body zones, and headshots actually mean something.

Thirdly. the physics of the flight and the landing of the arrow is more effective in Dark Messiah and Mount and Blade; the actual impact is rendered with a (admittedly sickening) *thunk* as the body recoils from the wound. If you shoot someone in the arm, that will affect the sword swing they were winding back.

Fourthly. Mount and Blade does breathing control when loosing arrows, and the longer you hold it nocked, the less accurate you are due to the strain. Additionally, you take a visible penalty for movement or on horseback, as your aim becomes much harder to control. I don't recall breathing control in Dark Messiah; it doesn't look like it. Thief had terrific breathing control, when you would time your shot to just after your initial intake of breath, or your aim began to swim.

TL;DR: body awareness, body zone physics, real damage modeling, more tangible impacts, and breathing control make for a better archery game. As it has NONE of these things, Skyrim is actually not very good at all as an archery FPS.

Now, that's not to say Skyrim ain't fun. It is, and I'm immersed in it as well. But if what you're looking for is combat physics, Bethesda has never been on the leading edge.

I think it would be cool to have arrows more varied, flaming arrows, poison arrows, nets(posted above), magical properties, etc as some form of upgrade/enhancement by a quiver full (crafted, enchanted, harvested from monsters that use them, etc). I've never seen it in a 3d game and it could be meaningful. Maybe you open with a fire arrow that does fire damage over time.

Darkfall actually had this now that I think about it, but they had transmuted bows(enhancement) that did different types of damage with regular arrows, ice, fire, earth, water, so for farming you'd grab one the monsters were weakest to(kill fire elementals with an ice bow for max dmg).

I think it would be cool to have arrows more varied, flaming arrows, poison arrows, nets(posted above), magical properties, etc as some form of upgrade/enhancement by a quiver full (crafted, enchanted, harvested from monsters that use them, etc). I've never seen it in a 3d game and it could be meaningful. Maybe you open with a fire arrow that does fire damage over time.

Thief had flaming arrows, rope & vine arrows (you could create your own thief highway with them), poison gas arrows, moss arrows (to muffle footsteps), water arrows (to douse torches and light sources), and noisemaker arrows (remote distraction).

If you're into FPS archery and haven't played Thief or Thief 2, you should! The series is a great part of gaming history. You can get them from GOG.com or Steam, and to patch them up:

Thief Gold: http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134733

Thief 2: http://kotaku.com/5946462/whoah-system-shock-2-and-thief-2-just-got-surprise-patches