Wow, what a fun thread to come in and read start to finish. On page 1, wuliheron and Lonbjerg are basically considered to be trolls. However, their statements are true and accurate, their wording is just harsh and emotional. The only reason the thread went on so long is that people refused to be the least bit open minded to what was being discussed and they refused to drop the issues. If you read it again, it can be kind of comical to see how many times something can be stated without being understood.
When I clicked on the thread, I came in here to say "Who gives a fuck about DX11, it won't save this game anyways". But I realized as I read it that the people who want DX11 don't necessarily want some shiny new graphical affect, they simply want the game to be more like Crysis and that I can agree with. Unfortunately, DX11 won't make Crysis 2 a sandbox game with a lot of fun things to do, the person who said you'll need a magnifying glass and comparison photos to see the difference is probably right. 9 times out of 10, after-the-fact graphical options tend to amount to not much of anything.
I'd like to address one of the reoccurring comments, which is that "the game isn't bad, as long as you don't compare it to it's predecessor". I think this is a ridiculous sentiment mainly because when you make a sequel, a large part of your target purchasing audience are the people who enjoyed the first game. So unless you come out and specifically say "I'm sorry but our veteran fans are going to absolutely hate this one" most people are going to consider a drastically different game as somewhat dishonest. And more often then not, you are better off giving the game a very specific name so that people do not think it is a sequel, such as Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles or Descent: Freespace. These types of changes do a lot to stem buyer misconception.
Let's get past that for a second, let's say that instead of comparing it to Crysis 1, we compare it to CoD. The first thing we have to acknowledge in such a comparison is that, the second we do this, we are saying to a lot of people "this is a bad game" because we are comparing it to a game that a lot of other people also think is bad. So even if it is accurate to say Crysis 2 is a good CoD clone, our statement alone has exemplified why many people would hate it without any further discussion.
But I'm going to go 1 step further, let's take the games that people are saying are good if you do not compare them to their predecessors. Dragon Age 2, Deus Ex 2, Crysis 2, Unreal 2. If we stop comparing these games, none of them were all that good on their own. These are all mediocre games, which means it isn't surprising if you enjoyed them but you should also be able to legitimately understand the concerns by which it became a mediocre game. Certainly, nobody would ever tell me not to compare Quake 2 to Quake 1, because they are both good games within the same genre. Nobody would ever tell me not to compare Civ 4 to Civ 5. We are being told not to compare these games because they simply aren't that good. If they had been firsts instead of sequels, the series may not have ever had any sequels. Something else to note about these sequels, if you look at many of these games you will see a sort of laziness in the feature-set. All of these games have that sort of "we cut out a lot of features" feature list that stems from the developer getting lazy and resting on the reputation of their first hit in the series.
The next thing I'd like to cover is performance related. One of the other arguments in the thread is that if you cannot run the game at the highest graphical level, then the game shouldn't have any additional graphical features. This is a logical fallacy because not every feature is an equal performance hit to each other. Often "very high" graphical settings tend to turn on things most people do not care about, such as uncompressed textures that can cause a massive performance hit. It doesn't make sense to then say, since you can't run uncompressed textures then you can't have windows that shatter or realistic water. The 2 are not related and this entire line of thinking of grossly broken. I hope you all realize how invalid this line of thought is without further discussion. Ultimately, if you asked if I'd rather have real time shadows or windows that break, destructible environment, drivable cars, more physics, etc - I'm ultimately going to say fuck shadows.
Which brings me to, I guess, what I feel about Crysis 2 and ultimately why I think other people feel let down. When Crysis 2 information was being discussed, one of the things that came up was that they were moving the series to a city environment as opposed to a jungle because that would allow them to make the game on consoles. When I heard that, in my mind, I thought that meant I'd be able to do all the things in Crysis 1 except not in a jungle. But it wasn't moving the game to the city that made it playable on a console, it was removing all of the things that made the game fun and unique. Ultimately it was game play and while you may hate that Crysis 1 was a graphical behemoth and may hate the ridiculous plot, I refuse to believe it had bad game play. I've seen a few people who seem to think that is some sort of irrefutable truth about C1 and I simply do not agree.
I'm going to end this post with 2 things. Someone alluded to the fact that gamers often have a binary rating system, if it isn't this then it sucks. I will admit that it may seem that way, but I consider this the "worth playing" rating system. Sometimes a game can be good, but it just isn't worth playing, meaning at the end of the day, when you get home from work, you simply don't want to fire it up despite how pretty the sidewalk looks in the game. This worth playing rating is ultimately the most important aspect of a game. When I picked up Crysis, I could barely put it down start to finish. I've started Crysis 2 but I'm not more than probably 4 hours into the game. While it looks decent and runs decent, I found nothing of interest to keep me pushing forward. I also had one embarrassing moment where I was standing in front of an ambulance trying to enter it when I clearly couldn't. And my last thing, in my opinion if they wanted to consolize Crysis, they should have gone the Just Cause route.