Marksmanship

 

Skyrim VR shipped with a “Realistic Bow Aiming” option, and it was actually pretty good! Of course it still wasn’t good enough for the sickos who make mods. MGO includes a few mods to make archery (and whatever you call “using a crossbow”) even better.

Archery

With aiming being pretty good in vanilla, the community needed other things to obsess over. They found plenty.

In vanilla, an arrow remains in your dominant hand after each shot. You have to hold Trigger as you nock each arrow, but you never have to grab a new arrow. With Simple Realistic Archery VR, you need to reach behind your shoulder and grab a new arrow with Trigger (or another button that you configure in the MCM1) after each shot. Seamless Arrow Nocking VR allows you to keep Trigger held down as you nock the new arrow, rather than needing to squeeze it a second time.

Haptic Skyrim VR adds haptic feedback for drawing your bow, among other things.

Pull Arrows VR - Immersive Extraction lets you recover your arrow by pulling them out of whatever (or whoever) they’re stuck in. Grab a stuck arrow with your hand, and pull it free. Pull them from walls, trees, bandits, and friends! The mod also adds some material-appropriate sound effects. It even lets you stab people with arrows.

With Ricochet - Arrow Physics Framework, arrows and bolts glance off of hard or angled surfaces and bounce around. You can tune its behavior in the included MCM.

Scared of Shootings does exactly what its subtitle promises: NPCs react to having a bow aimed at them. Draw down on someone and they’ll notice, and they won’t be thrilled about it. Now you’re a deadly force lurking in the treeline, not a weirdo pointing a longbow at a shopkeeper who couldn’t care less.

Crossbows

The “stealth archer” play style is a cliché at this point, but modders haven’t forgotten the crossbow-wielding vampire slayers out there. In vanilla, a crossbow reloads itself: after each shot, a fresh bolt simply materializes in place and the cocking lever pulls itself back, whether you like it or not. It’s convenient, but is convenience immersive? I didn’t think so.

Immersive Crossbow Reload VR makes you earn your reloads. It has a pretty big (but good, if you ask me) impact on balance. After each shot, grab a bolt from your lower back with Trigger, bring it to the crossbow to seat it, then grab the cocking mechanism2 and pull it back until the string locks. If the default buttons don’t suit you, you can remap bolt-grabbing and lever-pulling separately in the mod’s INI file.

The mods

For reference, here are all the marksmanship mods covered above:

  1. You can even use the MCM to bind different types of arrows to different buttons. ↩︎

  2. It’s called a goat’s foot lever. I looked it up. ↩︎