Ok, first of all to note, I have nothing against consoles, and absolutely nothing against console gamers.
The thing that bothers me about consoles is caused by the developers only.
Developers/Publishers think it is a good idea to port a game to as many platforms as possible (which probably is a good thing from a monetary point of view).
Now comes the problem, they don't go and make a game for the infrastructure of a PC, but for any of the consoles. That leads to almost no game for PC coming with any more than Directx9 support at the moment, neither with x64 support (especially not multi platform stuff).
With the age of the current console generation (not talking about PS4/XboxOne) being really weak hardware wise compared to current PCs, the mere presence of the consoles is at the moment slowing down the whole process of evolution for gaming. Developers could be doing so much more stuff on PCs at the moment, but as consoles aren't able to do it too, they just have to stick with what the consoles can do.
So I am really really happy as a PC gamer, that there is the new console generation coming, so we might get some new fancy stuff the next 2-3 years. Then things will probably slow down again, until the next generation consoles are available.
10 years ago that problem wasn't as dire as now, as most games weren't developed for multiple platforms. Also new consoles were appearing more frequently, with any of Playstation/Xbox/Nintendo appearing at least every 2 years. For this year, all of the present consoles are minimum 7 years old (PS3/Wii the newest since 2006). Though I might want to separate Wii from Playstation and Xbox, as there are rarely titles ported for PC + PS/Xbox and Wii altogether.
So yeah over the last 2-3 years I got annoyed by the presence of the current consoles because they were slowing down everything. But that has nothing to with the gaming itself or the gamers.
Athinira said:
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).
For this I have to say... when I was younger... and there was a new game with cool graphics out... I'd just go and buy some new parts to get the most of it. And even then alot of games I remember only ran really well with the hardware of maybe a year later.
Same goes for Crysis. It was the first game for a felt eternity that was really demanding of your hardware. And I was really really happy about that. There is absolutely nothing wrong with making a game that will only run smooth on full settings maybe a year later than it's airing date.
Also even Crysis was already pretty well adjustable to lower hardware, even if Crysis2 did improve on that even further (though that also may have been caused by the fact that highend PCs from Crysis were midrange for Crysis2, and the hardware demand didn't rise very much really). And Crysis2 with Cryengine3 was far off from being as much of a milestone in terms of graphics than Crysis was (which might have something to do with consoles? ^^).