I agree. No matter how much people screech about realism etc, there is a large swath of stimuli missing from a game. Stimuli that enables or deters certain actions.
The capabilities of computations provided by the trained brain’s heuristics is amazing at times. While maths and logical thinking is part of every target-sport. Everyone would agree that you simply stop thinking and exist in the moment when you try and hit a target. This is because you free up your brain to account for an insane amount of stimuli that current grafical engines cannot communicate… speaking only of visual stimuli.
More than that, the brain also accounts for things like weight of the arrow, how straight it is, how flexible it is. And so on. There are so many heuristics in play that people themselves are not aware of. Targetshooting in the end is about letting your complementary brain-areas autotarget. The shooter simply decides that they want to hit the arrow, and how efficiently they trained their heuristics, and how efficiently they can recreate the same exact environment, is what decides if you hit the target or not. This is even more true when it comes to moving targets. Your brain computes the target movements and predicts where they will be based on gait, speed, logical movement of something trying to avoid getting hit.
While KC:D is perhaps the most realistic I have seen a game, it still only provides a minimal aspect of the sum total for properly realistic archery. So instead of trying for perfect realism, they should aim for representation of realism. The difference could be between good art and a photo. A photo is without a doubt the most realistic depiction of a scene, but the art-piece provides more realism because it communicates an interpretation of reality that a flat picture, or even a 3D picture, cannot convey.
