Reise said:
It's very frustrating being a PC gamer nowadays. As far as I'm aware, Crysis is still the most graphically advanced game on the market because it's the only one that bothered to push on the PC, then the sequels were picked up with consoles in mind and it was a step back in terms of graphics because it had to perform on much lower quality equipment.
While the rest of your post is great (I'd almost say absolutely brilliant), I had to quote out the above part, because that is simply the one point where you are drastically incorrect.
While the first Crysis indeed did look great, that's only half of what it was renowned for. The other part it was renowned for was the fact that pretty much no PC at the time could run it at a consistent FPS at maximum settings. Crysis was put up on a pedastal, because it could be considered (too use a phrase by Yahtzee) 'a ritualistic trial by fire for their processor' (or rather, computers overall). It was the game pretty much everyone used to benchmark their gaming PC's, hence the 'Can it play crysis' joke.
However, the reason for this isn't that Crysis was a graphical marvel that many mistakingly think it is. Yes it looked great and had a lot of impressive effects (lens flares, sunshafts), but the truth of the matter was that the engine was in fact horribly optimized. Pretty much all of the features in their engine was put in on the premise that 'If you have the PC to run this, it will be cool', with little thought being given to any actual performance budget.
And this is where Crysis 2 - running on the CryEngine 3 - actually came in with improvement. You said something very incorrect in your post which was the Crysis 2 looked inferior to Crysis 1. While it did have some shortcomings compared to the original such as lower texture resolutions (which was later retified) and an initial lack of DX11 features, it still looked better. Anyone who says otherwise needs to go back, play both games and notice the differences. The LOD handling in CryEngine 3 is miles better than in CryEngine 2 (especially in regards to objects who completely fade out once you get some distance from them), and the same goes for the weather effects and color grading (which was far more vibrant on CryEngine 3).
Most importantly, however, the engine was way better optimized than its predecessor, and ran well even on midrange PC's while still looking good. Try churning the settings for the original Crysis to the lowest, and see how it looks (hint: it basically looks like crap).
The reason that Crysis 2 got so much heat from PC gamers was that the customization options was removed and so was the DX11 features (as well as other few minor quips like the texture resolution i mentioned earlier). Not only was the graphic settings beyond resolution, AA, VSYNC and 3D reduces to 3 options (named Hardcore, Advanced, Gamer), but the option to tweak these settings in the console was also removed. This infuriated a lot of people, which is understandable, because the original crysis could be tweaked in a million ways, and there are actually some great configs out there for the first crysis that can push the settings beyond the maximum in the options menu, or even make the game run better on low-end PC's without making it look totally like the 'crap' i mentioned in the end of the last paragraph. But again, these things were all brought back in a later patch, and the hate died down.
But the TL/DR point of all this drivel i just spouted is that Crysis 2 and Crysis 3 following it is actually one of the games that has benefitted from being designed for consoles too. It made them finally realize that an engine doesn't need to just look impressive and have a lot of impressive features, but it also needs to run well at the same time, which the original failed at. Now the games only needs to make up for all of the other shortcomings they have (like the terrible storytelling), but at least they ended up with a solid engine which they even licence out, so that we can get a lot of great looking games that run well, both for console and PC's