Archery in Trine game series

Today I want to write about something which is not just a horrible picture on the Internet. Instead it's a game series I actually like a lot. Trine is a fantastic platformer video game, which is made in my own country, Finland. The game features three as-generic-as-you-can-imagine fantasy characters; a knight, a thief, and a wizard. The knight is fat and wears a shining armour, big sword and a red cape, the wizard looks like a Lego wizard (blue Gandalf) with Fu Manchu moustache and the thief is a cross of Altaïr from Assassins Creed and an oriental belly-dancer.

My favourite character of them is the thief, not because I like to watch her polygons, but because she is the most fun to play with, jumping and flying around with a grappling hook like a female Tarzan. She also has a bow to shoot enemies with. I've played the first two games of the series through, haven't yet bought the third one, and I just heard that a fourth one is also coming out, hopefully later this year.

Now I want to talk about the thief and her archery. Mainly from the concept art and cover images of the games, since arhcery is done relatively well in the games themselves, although the bow is hopelessly underpowered compared to any real life bow.

The first picture (in the top of this post) is the cover of the first Trine game (2009). The cover art is not of high quality, which is typical for Finnish games, unfortunately.

Mistakes: The bow is way too small. You could possibly make a bow this short, but it would need to be a lot thinner to be able to be bent with human arms. This is the size of an arc of a crossbow. If a bow is this short and this thick it would need some mechanism to be pulled, like a crossbow has. It is way too short to be a working bow. The bowstring loses some potential of the already very short bow by tying itself not in the ends of the arc, but several inches inward from the nocks. Looks like the maker of that bow also didn't know how the bostring should be attached so it is wrapped around the bow limbs many times, which is certainly not how it is done. One look at a decent bow woul've fixed these errors. (Also if the bow would be this short and this thick, so that it has the power similar to a crossbow, the bowstricg would need to be thrice thicker, otherwise it would just snap)

Russian version of Trine for Linux. This represents Russian game art, which is obviously of higer quality to Finnish one. They have although "localised" the characters to fit more Russian tastes. The knight being not fat anymore and infinitely more handsome than the original, and his armour being more realistic. The thief being even more sexualised than in the original, the facecover changed to a see-through cloth like oriental belly dancers have (at least in our fantasies), and her clothes decorater with Russian patterns. The wizard has been given more serious look compared to the comical character he was in the original, and he has also been dressed in a gown resempling a bit Eastern European cossack coats. All the characters' facial features look Russian to me. Interesting details all.

Good: The bow of the thief has been made more realistic, being long enough to be actually usable. The decorations are kind of elvish, from Legolas' bow from Lord of the Rings most probably. Another good thing is that she has an archers bracer only in her bow hand.

The cover of Trine 2 (2011). Mistakes:

1. The thief shoots a fire arrow (which she can in the games), even though there is no purpose. Fire arrows were never shot against people (or trolls) on purpose. They were used to light buildings on fire, and were very rarely used, and only in sieges.

2. The more problematic thing in this picture is her bow though. It does not bend. It looks like a bow looks when the string has not been pulled at all. This is a rubber band stick, not a working bow. It might shoot an arrow a few meters like a rubber band could, but it is not a weapon of any kind.

3. The thief has been given bracers to both forearms, without any reason.

The cover for Trine 3 (2015). Mistakes:

1. The bow is now bigger than before, and more recurved, which is okay, but it is too thick. It should be altogether thinner and then also thin towards to ends of the limbs. This would be very hard to pull. It also looks uneven and unfinished, as if somebody just put decorations on a random tree branch.

2. What's the purpose of those bronze elements? To my knowledge no bow ever had these kind of huge bronze elements. They would make it unnecessary heavy, especially the bronze pieces on the end of the bow limbs.

3. In this other picture the bowstring goes way too close to the handle of the bow. The distance between the bow arc and the string in the middle is called a fistmele, and in longbows it should be approximately the length of the users fist and thumb combined. In recurve boughs however the distance is even greater. This is way too small and makes the bow unnecessarily difficult to use.

4. The thief has bracers on both forearms.

Cover for Trine 4 (2019).
The writer and art director for this game are women (I actually know the writer of this game), which can be seen in the changed appear of the thief character. She is de-sexualised, cleavage is gone, and she has been given pants under her openly flowing white robe. Sadly the bow has not improved, quite the contrary.

Mistakes:

1. The bow now has a useless metallic arc "protecting" the hand holding the bow. This king of arc was never built in a real bow, because it's both useless and harmful to the performance of the bow. It can also interfere with the flight of the arrow.

2. In the cover picture the thief is shooting in Mediterranean grip with three fingers it seems, which is correct, but the arrow is on the right side of the bow, which is extremely rare, although done occasionally in Europe. But when the arrow is on the right side of the bow, it rests on the thumb of the bow hand, not on the index finger.

3. In the gameplay itself the thief shoots with a Mediterranean grip but only uses two fingers two draw. This is not good, she should use three. The arrow is also misplaced on top of all the drawing fingers, when in reality it should be between the index and middle fingers of the drawing hand. Here the arrow goes on the left side of the bow though.

4. The "bracers" in this game feature the grappling hook mechanisms she uses for climbing, but it makes a very bad bracers used for archery. The left bracer has some metal rod in the inside of the forearm, which would severely interfere with the bowstring and could even snap it in two (even that overly thick bowstring we see here). That's very bad.

Good:
The main good thing I can say about the archery in this series is that the thief uses a hip quiver, and not a back quiver, throughout all the games. This is more believable and works great!

Do elf ears freeze in winter?

Why would anyone care about the shape of their ears so much that they would cut holes in their perfectly good and warm hood so that their ears will freeze in the winter? Is there really nothing else that the draughtsman can use to distinguish a character as an elf? And why has every archer character has to be an elf? And a woman? And an elf-woman? WHY? Somebody answer me.

Mistakes:

1. This bow is completely stupid. Looks like it's made of metal and it wouldn't bend at all. It's also covered in blades which is a very bad idea.

2. The bowstring is attached to nowhere near the ends of the bow. This is as stupid as putting the handle of the sword in the middle of the blade, or attaching a speartip in the middle of the shaft. Such a waste.

3. Is this a freaking fire arrow? Looks like napalm or something burning. Nope.

4. The age-old trop of the back quiver not supported by much historical evidence in Europe.

What's the point of fire arrows in Mordor?

This may be a Mordor orc or a goblin or something. I don't really care. But what I do care about are the mistakes!

1. This bow is stolen from Lara Croft. The young version, with more clothes and less boobs than usual. Also less of a bow, since it's made out of a bunch of sticks. It would be quite easy to make a bow from one piece of wood, but maybe orcs want to make everything crappy on purpose. Then again in many fantasy lores they are good craftsmen and smiths, but it doesn't really show since their products are terrible and typically unusable crap. Like this bunch of sticks here.

2. Are all these arrows used thousand times since the fletching of orc arrows is always so bad? Too little space between the fletching and the nock maybe be half the reason for that. And what is the purpose of keeping the arrow between teeth? It would seriously be in the way of the bowstring while shooting, and getting the arrow from there is not in any way faster than from some other places. I would even guess it would be slower to get it from there. Faster would be to keep several arrows in your hand already, either the bow hand or the string hand (the latter is even faster of the two).

3. He has a back quiver and a hip quiver, but why? If you are used to a hip quiver, why to have also a back quiver, isn't it just confusing? Why not two hip quivers, people (and orcs) have two hips after all?

4. The grip is wrong, two fingers used instead of three and the hand is palm down when it should be the other way around in this position. Also nobody would want to spend their energy unnecessarily by pulling the string half way back at this point when the bow isn't pointing anywhere near the direction of shooting.

5. Fire arrows. Stupid fire arrows again. What are he going to set on fire? The rocks? The volcano? It is already on fire! And there's nothing else that can be burning in a range of miles around him. The land of Mordor is completely barren. Fire arrows were not shot against people, since it's completely unnecessary, people die perfectly well from hits of regular arrows, and actual fire arrows would do less damage to people than normal arrows, because of the structure of their arrowtips.

Ranger posse with fiery arrows

A group of rangers, inspired by Lord of the Rings etc. a nice looking photo, but...

mistakes:

1. Why are all four of them aiming at different directions? Some to the ground, and some to the air. What kind of enemy could lurk in all directions, also in the sky? Oh, now I get it, they just posed like this to make the picture look more dramatic!
2. Fire arrows!!!! What is it that they need to use fire arrows for? Surely it won't be an enemy, since fire arrows weren't used against people. But maybe these are in a fantasy setting (certainly the costumes aren't what anybody in real history would have worn) and they have supernatural monsters as targets, that are vulnerable to fire? Anyway, these fire arrows lack arrowtips, which is bad since they won't stick to anything. It's a usual misconception to wrap the head of the arrow inside a burning matter, but this is not how real fire arrows were, or should be, made. Real fire arrows have a sharp tip, which forms a kind of small metallic cage for the burning matter.
3. Everyone's of course having a back quiver. Even with the cloaks. So that the quiver prevents the cloak from being used as it is meant to be used, to cover and shield the user from wind, cold, rain and other elements. But of course fantasy cloaks are only used because they look cool!
4. The form of the arms are not the optimal on this one. The arms should align even when aiming upwards.

Isis spreads terror with a "bow"

These pictures are from a trailer of an online videogame called Smite. I don't really care about games in which you just fight against other nerds with candy graphic characters in a low polygon environment. Complete waste of time, as well as boring game design.

The trailer showed this obviously (clichéd) Egyptian goddess, who cannot be anyone else than Isis, since Isis is the only human faced Egyptian goddess the general public knows about (how about Maat anyone?)

Like all this game's female characters, our friend Isis here is dressed in a very revealing attire, which in this case is blatantly copied from Anaksunamun's similarly skimpy and also golden outfit from the film Mummy (1999) (the yellow lipstick is also same). They thought I didn't remember, didn't they? Anyway, the dress has to be either glued on her fake breasts, or then it's just bodypaint, which seems quite likely here. Animation of this trailer is especially bad, since it has no feel of gravity or realism in any sense of the word. The characters are just massless CGI-lumps flying everywhere at the same time. How about motion capture the next time guys?

But now to the mistakes, regarding the thing they call archery in this video:

1. This "bow" has three strings. THREE (3) STRINGS!!! What in the actual afterlife is this? Bows have one bowstring for a reason. And we will come to that later. Three strings in this "bow" makes this one of the (if not THE) worst depiction of a bow in the history of the Universe.
2. What are these three spikes in each end of the bow? They severely disturb the bowstring(s). They can even brake it/them (if it/they would not be made out of "magical glowing substance").
3. Reverse grip in the string hand. Later she uses this hand the other side up, so this is just a mistake.
4. What is this Kheperi-shaped golden shield with a large saphire doing in this "bow"? This is the size of the steel bucklers some archers used in later medieval times, but it was never attached to the bow itself of course, and never used at the same time with the bow. It only disturbs shooting more. The bow is not meant for blocking anything, it will brake.
5. Fire arrows, too much fire arrows! Why won't regular arrows do? Do they think people die more if they are penetrated with an arrow which is also on fire? Because real fire arrows were constructed differently than normal arrows, they were slower and penetrated less, so they'd be actually less dangerous against other people. Thus they were never used against humans, only (VERY RARELY!) against some objects which had to be set on fire.
6. This (left) is the side of the bow the arrows should (usually, and in this case) go, not the right side.
7. What are these blades doing in this monstrosity? Bows are not meant for hitting, but shooting! It won't last long as a mêlée weapon. Also these metal blades make the "bow" weight a ton. In this picture we can see that it more resembles an ancient harp than a bow. Maybe it's for playing music, and not fighting at all? Would make more sense.
8. Were are her arrows? There is no quiver to be seen or any spare arrows anywhere. That is a bad fighting plan.
9. Three arrows at once. While it is possible to shoot three arrows at once (I've done it) it's it not good to do so. The aim is terrible and they also have less power than one arrow would have. At least two arrows are also wasted if shooting at the same target. The arrows are also impossible to hold here, that's why I drew this circle.
10. WHAT, she releases one string at a time!!! And that actually works?!? The makers of this video has no knowledge of archery at all it seems now. The bow arc is the one which flexes and gives the power to the arrows, the string does not stretch! If a bow would have three strings it would do nothing, since it would be (theoretically) possible to shoot the three arrows at the same time, not one after another without flexing the bow again. This is just pure nonsense and a crappy idea from start to finish! Shame on you game maker dudes!
11. This bow is also about 10 times too thick. It wouldn't bend at all, but it seems like a minor mistake compared to the last one, even though this'd be a major mistake in a piece which would be otherwise decently designed. This is not.
12. Why is she having this "glove"? Is it supposed to be archers glove? Since this does only cover the area which does not touch anything while shooting, so it's completely useless. Archers glove should cover the first three fingers, not just knuckles! Also the larger bracer is in the right hand, when it would be better on the left, but they are here to bring the "Egyptian" feel anyway, even though Egyptians didn't use these kind of bracers.

Good, hahaha, are you kidding me?!?
Our Isis (not to be confused with the infamous terrorist organization, which boasts with a name of a false god (in their belief system)) does not have a bow here. This is not a bow, this terror is something else, straight from Ammit's rectum.

P.S.
Oh, now I noticed that the arrows don't have fletching at all, but whatever, this disaster couldn't be any worse.