[QUOTE="skrat_01"]
[QUOTE="lightleggy"]
exactly.
I made a diagram, not exactly a paint prodigy but this explains it pretty good
The game would give you the illusion of being open world, but it was not, you HAD to go through the designated path because it was the only path you could take, im not even exaggerating, go play the game again and try to reach an objective from a different area, it's literally impossible, not one objective can be reached from another point, its all like a colander.
lightleggy
It was never an open world game, what is was is afar more open game with massive scale.Crysis 1 would funnel at times, but when it hit the right paces, open right out and give the player tons of room to move and navigate; avoid enemies, attack, run and gun, sneak - snipe from way back, etc.
It was much more atuned to its open ended sandbox design, and allowing players to change how they played on the fly.
It's problem was for anything narrative based or heavily paced it was hard to structure an open play-space for it, which is why the game would funnel in on a convergence point, and the level geometry would pull inwards.
Warhead actually tried to hit a balance, and did a prety succesful job imho.
Crysis 2 on the other hand hadextremely rigidly designed levels. These utterly lacked the open playspaces of Crysis's levels, and didn't have half the systems going on (a.i. generally and reactive, destruction, physics, interactable assets etc.) - this was mainly due to the memory limitations and Crytek wanting to pace and direct the gameplay very heavily; far more then in Warhead.
And they botched it, Crytek can't pace a great scripted shooter well at all. It sucked in Far Cry, in Crysis, and in Crysis 2 it was at its worst, the game by the half way point hit the point of stagnation; one combat sequence, downtime, another, rinse repeat.
The more freeform gameplay of Crysis was thrown out, and that hurt the game quite a lot.
But yeah.
Not open world, open ended.
The only thing that changed in C2 was the enviromental destruction, physics and the AI quality.
The levels are still very big, and keeping in mind my illustration, i'd say it was the same.
These games work like that, they put you in a corridor (in C1 they gave you an illusion of being in an open world, but it was always a corridor, as I have explained) and then the corridor leads to a large battleground, this is the case in both C1 and C2, most battlegrounds in C2 were extremely large and offered a bunch of different approaches, I didnt liked C2 that much but I have beaten it twice to this day and im pretty sure I was able to sneak or go guns blazing on several points, again with a lot of freedom, just not some C1 features like being able to destroy stuff, or having competent AI, but as far as scale goes, actual scale, not just perceived game world, C1 and C2 were the same.
Heck no, there were huge changes. The pacing, the level design, the reliance and focus on scripting, the closer slant towards direct combat (cover shooting), the scale and open-endedness and yeah - the physics and a.i. Crysis 2 doesn't feature 'very big' levels. Sure they're larger then average, I'll sure as hell agree, and they offer some freeform gameplay at times (when the game really hits its strides), but they're still tightly architected and funnelled to compensate for memory restrictions per asset count, a.i. and of course - the games pacing. Seriously, open up the largest Crysis 1 level next to the largest Crysis 2 level in their respective sandbox editors - there's a massive difference. The only major difference I'd say is that Crysis 2 has a far stronger aesthetic generally speaking, even if it and Crysis are fairly so-so stylistically imho. Hell, I know how these games work, building and studying this kind of thing is more or less what I do. Yes they are essentially 'corridoors' but that's such a poor use of the word you'd be missing the qualities of the levels and design entirely. I'm not saying open world, I'm saying *open ended* and they are; there's a huge difference between Crysis's level design to a 'large geometrically sculpted corridoor' like Halo, or a multi-linear environment like in Dishonored. Crysis's levels have a directed open-ended flow, towards a singular point. sometimes with sub objectives; what makes it stand out is the sheer scope of space between the player and the objective generally speaking, and the branching paths to reach there. Crysis 2 doesn't have that freedom. Aye, you can cloak at any time, but there's hardly any space in choosing how to proceed from A to B most of the time; the levels are far smaller and restricted and enemies often populate those bottleneck that bridge one 'instanced zone' (or micro-sandbox) to the next, wheras Crysis has none of this (the first signs of this were in Warhead). This is on reason why the suits speed ability was nuked, and the games pace was dramatically slowed (and a cover system was implemented) - make getting from A to B more time intensive, and slow the pace of the game ,and thus the players mobility. This extends into the combat design. levels are fixed around cover locations - and there's a ton more then in Crysis; this fits right with the slower pace - moving from cover location to another, as well as the combat focus. Less speed means escaping alerted enemies is much more difficult. Much more, and it sure as hell shows in the games. So additional cover means the player has more place to hide, that doubles as cover for shooting -the player is less mobile and sneaky, thus sticks to these spots. And this shows more and more and more. Crysis 2 keeps sticking to a pacing that goes - micro-sandbox - connecting path (sometimes with enemies or story exposition), then another micro-sandbox or - a new big focus of Crysis 2 - a fixed arena combat sequence, that consists of kill X enemy to proceed. These appear very, very often in Crysis 2 - from the Alien Walkers, to defending locations with soliders until waves end - much, much more when the game hits the half way point. They're very different games. In terms of scale, freeform gameplay, pacing and gameworld, when you begin looking at the intrinsic qualities and direction of either game. Neither are perfect either, far from it, but Crysis 2 is a substantially different game, and far more conservative to Crysis 1 in terms of what defined that game. Which is why Crytek are harping on saying that Crysis 3 will call back to what made Crysis 1 what it was, yada yada.
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