I decided to go back and visit a game I hadn't played in well over a decade: Crysis 2. It's a 7th gen shooter, alright: iron sight aiming, incomprehensible military plot, rather formulaic guns, little enemy variety, and graphics glowing nuclear bloom everywhere. It's alright. But that's not what I wanted to talk about. Since the original Crysis was such a huge benchmark for graphics, this obviously had some big shoes to fill. The game looks great, don't get me wrong: this is still among the top tier visuals from 2011. But I always felt that there was something just... off about the graphics that Crysis 1 didn't have. And I think I've finally figured it out: it's the lighting. This was released when games were just about to cross the threshold on true photorealism, so it's obviously aiming to look as realistic as possible. But the lighting is just way overdone: everything's very bright, which combined with the extensive environmental detail and lack of strong contrast or negative space makes it hard to read a lot of the time. It's incredibly easy to lose sight of the enemies amidst the lighting, environmental detail and graphics effects like dust, shrapnel and camera lens effects.
This is intentional since it was clearly aiming for the CoD crowd, but it's interesting how much just slight differences in design can have big ripple effects. Enemies blending with the background works in more linear shooters, because it's always clear which direction the enemies are and where they're going to pop up. Crysis 2 is very linear, but its combat arenas are more open, and enemies move around a lot more. Which in turn makes them way easier to lose and harder to keep track of, often turning the combat into a frantic scramble when it seems to aim for more tactical, methodical engagements with the suit powers, tactical scanner and more mobility options. The way the suit's been redesigned also doesn't help: the absurd anime-level sprint from the original has been turned into a sluggish, CoD-esque jog, which both hurts the power fantasy of playing a supersoldier and makes repositioning a lot harder. The suit's power also runs out very fast, often making movement rather stop-and-start as you hunker down for a moment and wait for the energy to recharge. Playing on the second hardest difficulty I've often just stayed in one spot taking pot shots at enemies, and then repositioning only slightly once the previous position becomes untenable. It feels rather stiff and static in what should be a way more mobile shooter.
