Not really a question or anything but I imagine that if someone hasn’t already seen this it would be a pretty fun video to watch because hey let’s face it, everyone on this forum is a realism-nerd ^^
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I’ve always despised the “It’s fantasy!” argument for such things.
lets face it, most devs design fantasy because they have no preexisting knowledge or common sense about historical weapons/no interest or curiosity about them, so it’s easier for them, and finally, they don’t like to think critically! they just want to design all manner of ugly things without thinking practically about how such things would behave
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Opening this thread and seeing the red letters I had a hunch it would be a skallagrim video.
Checking it out, yep
Weapons are just a part of the problem of incompetent designers. Same thing with armors/clothes in games like this, but not just fantasy, sci-fi too. MMORPGs are perfect example. From WoW to SWTOR.
Are you trying to tell me that people didn’t use to wear stylized windmills as shoulder pads?
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I don’t think it’s about incompetency. It’s easy for anyone to find out how it should be, but in fantasy games like WoW or Skyrim realism simply isn’t something they want to achieve. The goal is more like to make it as badass as possible. And I don’t find it wrong, it’s just different approach. In a medieval game, you want realistic weapons, in a fantasy game, you want fantasy weapons. To be honest, Warcraft without absurdly big weapons and armors simply wouldn’t be Warcraft. It’s part of the universe. Also it’s competely undestandable in MMORPGs, which are based on getting better and better equipment, that weapons are still bigger and bigger and more badass as your character progress…
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Yeah but WoW has that kind of cartoonish ridicoulus style that works so well for it, Skyrim on the other hand did try to make the weapons look kind of realistic?
Well, guy in the video said it right in the beginning, “they seem to have completely discarded the historical inspiration and just went with whatever they thought look cool”. People might like it or not, but I don’t think that makes designers incompetent, they just have different goal than realism.
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Fantasy is fantasy. So what? If someone’s trying to actually make something realistic and completely botches it, by all means hold them accountable to it. But in fantasy, you can make whatever you want. It doesn’t automatically mean you CAN’T make something more realistic.
There is a place for fantasy, just as there is a place for historically accurate, period weapons and clothing. Sure, it may be easier to make what you want to and go wild with it, but it’s a stretch to just take it to the level of saying “they don’t like to think critically.” The concepts are not automatically connected.
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world of warcraft looks and plays like a cartoon, but skyrim doesn’t. clear thematic and aesthetic differences.
if you make a fantasy weapon for skyrim that looks “bad ass” aka cuts the users hand more than it cuts the opponent, is too big to be functional, i think the “critical reasoning” argument is valid.
all fantasies and science fiction have their internal logic. if they fail to explain something, the automatic assumption shouldn’t be magic, it should be, they failed to explain something. axe with little teeth that cut the user’s hand? you can be fantasy designer with zero understanding of medieval weapons, but you can still use common sense to realize that is just dumb. 
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