Look at that archer in the background to the left. The arrow is over half the times the length of the bow! That bow looks to be at full draw already…
This makes relative sense, though. The archers have exagerated features so they can be seen well from a distance in the chaos of battle. Just like Ravanna…
Oh yeah, doesn't it look like MJ reduced the endowment of the peasant women?
Just to point out, it looks like the archers have two bow permutations: one type of bow is just a standard longbow; the other is slightly recurved. How interesting… perhaps the recurve bow was just invented around this time.
: 1. The arrow was really close to the camera, hence
: appeared bigger than it actually was.
Not in the above picture.
: 2. The archer's quivers are half-filled with stuff, like
: spare shirts (to replace the bloodied ones between
: levels) and the half-eaten remains of a sandwich.
: Also, those could well be golf clubs in the quivers,
: not arrows.
Again, the pictures above also show arrows in flight and in half-arrow-filled quivers (there are less arrows in the quiver of the archer in the foreground left…we may have to pick up arrows from the field…cool :).
: 3. The bows are not wood, but made of the latest graphite
: compound.
We'll dismiss this out of hand :-).
: 4. The arrows aren't fired at full draw.
By the looks of the background left archer, he was at full draw a milisecond earlier, which would mean the bow was beant even more. Those arrows seem better suited to a giant's bow, like the one read about in (I think) ki'Angsi's flavor, stringing the giant's bow. They're also like iu'Shee's from TFL:
"Yesterday, I saw iu’Shee, captain of archers, with a fist full of white arrows five feet long and tipped with fragments of bone. I lost track of who was carrying The Watcher’s arm when we fled Silvermines, but I suspect it's turned up again."
Those arrows look pretty long. It's possible ui'Shee got a longer bow, but how much longer for arrows those size?
It doesn't matter though. Let's just say the Cath Bruig have some really flexible short bows (which is what they look like to me—not too long at all). If they're a combination of a shortbow and a longbow, that would probably allow for some pretty major curvature of the bow, and explain what we're seeing here.
In any case, these are the best looking archers I've seen so far in Myth. I like their bows especially, and the arrow length doesn't bother me that much. If they actually give some decent-looking drawn art for headshots instead of the stupid 3-D mod headshots, I'll be considering changing my signature image:
