Infantry in the Middle Ages heavy toll on the English invaders of their lands. Adapted by the English, the longbow was nevertheless a difficult weapon to master, requiring long years of use and practice. Even bow construction was extended, sometimes taking as much as four years for seasoned staves to be prepared and shaped for final deployment. A skilled longbowman could shoot 12 arrows a minute, a rate of fire superior to competing weapons like the crossbow or early gunpowder weapons. The nearest competitor to the longbow was the much more expensive crossbow or Arbalest, used often by urban militias and mercenary forces. It required
BFG (weapon) player who fired the shot; this increases the weapon's devastating area-of-effect. One peculiar quirk about the internal workings of the game code is that it remembers the direction the player fired the shot in, but not the position, meaning that the player is allowed to move far away even into an entirely different room, and still deal damage to whoever is in that room depending on the timing of the projectile's impact. In "Doom 3", the BFG 9000 is a charged weapon: holding down the trigger causes the weapon to accumulate energy before release, resulting in a more powerful shot.