User blog comment:LilyheartsLightning/Citadel and Reckoning DLC announced/@comment-24174486-20130225174706/@comment-4721065-20130226064934

Technically, the bow does somewhat make sense: the kinetic barriers are only supposed to work against very fast-moving objects, so the slow-moving arrows with explosive tips (which is what the omni-bow is going to be, apparently.) should be quite effective.It does however raise the question of why they weren't used before in the series, though.

I would also question using conventional bows: their real-life accuracy is correctly shown in Medieval II (where out of 60 arrows about 3-5 actually manage to kill someone) and it makes no sense to use them when you could make FAR more accurate crossbows instead. Unfortunately, "ye longbows are so cool OMGG" in the mindset of public apparently, so AC3, Crysis and now ME3 have decided to go with it. I think Crysis is the worst about it personally, because their in-universe justification is "its use doesn't break the camouflage unlike guns", which makes no sense, as bow is both a much larger and complicated object to conceal, but using it also requires far more movement and exertion than that of guns, absolutely debunking the concept. Even if you say that's all about the recoil, grenade launchers have very little of those (check out TVTropes Law of Inverse Recoil for explanation), so by all rights players should be using those instead of bows.