Description
A weapon that shoots out silently bolts at long ranges. Used as a sniper in some games, such as Half Life 2 and many others. The weapon comes in many different sizes and shapes, yet has the same purpose: To kill enemies
stealthily at long range. Can also be used to pin objects and bodies onto walls. Often found in medieval games and some heroic fantasy games, they are also found but more rarely in modern time games and even futuristic games.
While the crossbow is widely used in ancient time games, in modern games it's a military weapon, animal hunting weapon, sports weapon, or a secret agent weapon, games like
NOLF and
Deus Ex features crossbows in a such purpose.
Variants
Crossbows exits in variants listed below, the list will contain major variants.
Single shot
This is the most common variant used in almost any games, the crossbow needs to be reloaded and rearmed (cocked) every time we fire a bolt, this variant in some games can also shoot multiple bolts at once, but can't shoot them independently without reloading and rearming, it often happen that the realism is dropped during the rearming process because some crossbows needs the foot to rearm the cord or a leverage crank to do it
Multishot with multiple bows
This variant allow to shoot as much bolts as the crossbow have bows, these crossbow can shoot bolts simultaneously or bolt by bolt, few games uses these kind of crossbow and they tend to appear in some steampunk themed games
Multishot single bow
This kind of crossbow is close to a bolt action
sniper rifle or the single shot variant but with a magazine, most modern games have this kind of crossbow, like
Half life,
Will rock, and
Deus Ex, every time we shoot a bolt, we have to rearm the weapon after each shot
Automatic
The automatic crossbow is close to the multishot variant, the chinese cho ko nu is an example, the rearming lever serves also as a fire mechanism, this crossbow isn't accurate and have a short rrange, but it has a good rate of fire, the other variant of the automatic crossbow, it's the multishot variant but with an electric motor, this version allows a fast and almost accurate fire, but it loses a bit it's stealth purpose since the motor and the gears makes some noise, but it's truly automatic.
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