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Comment by Stevvo | Hacker News Reader

I have nostalgia for the games of that era far more than the hardware. While the hardware has come leaps and bounds, the gameplay has gone backwards. Take battlefield as an example; back then it was a tactical team-based shooter, today it's a gallery shooter. Same thing with the Crysis series; every entry got dumbed down.

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The Crysis 1 -> 2 experience felt so disappointing. I loved how Crysis 1 there were no limits to the weapon attachments or switching suit functions. I remember Crysis 1 with the silenced pistols with laser pointers you would 100% hit where the laser was pointing. I'd go full cheese and sneak up to the enemy, de-cloak, 1 shot dead, re-cloak.

All to push a story which started with an off screen killing of Nomad.

I remember pushing the limits of "fast" gameplay with really fast suit mode switching, and before that modifying the suit values in an .ini file in the game directory to have flash-level speed and infinite energy.

It's a shame that they dumbed it down in the sequels so much for the consoles. And that the game became so much worse _as a game_ (even if my first play through had my jaw hit the floor when I entered the alient ship) after the midpoint. Punching through plywood shacks for an ambush, jumping high for a grenade, using speedmode to get a flank (which the AI would be unaware of - if they couldn't see you!).

Yeah it was a good time.

The multiplayer of Crysis 1 was unique. I wish "something" happens to either bring back some people to the old one (there are ways to play it after the official servers shut down, but the community is dead), a new mod, or the multiplayer being added to the official remastered version.

Yeah absolutely. The dumb down of the story almost killed me back then. I had so much hope for Crysis 2 but was disappointed that it was just an ordinary shooter with meh enemies. The tech is there but the design is way worse.

Not quite following the dumbed down story part. Crysis2 had Richard Morgan responsible for the broader story beats and it explored some quite interesting topics.

Maybe it's just my personal preference but I feel the aliens of 1 is a lot cooler than the one in 2. 1 also gives kind of hang at the end but I feel 2 concludes it a bit too quickly. Again just my preference. Don't know the right word for it, but I like when an idea is not presented clearly to the audience, for example in 1 the aliens are essentially lovecraftian, we have a lot of questions unanswered. I feel 2 answers these questions too clearly.

One of my fondest memories around Crysis is the whole "but can it run Crysis" unofficial benchmark. I remember everyone looking at the game going "yeah my machine can't run this". Ended up the game ran pretty well even on my potato machine back then, just had to keep all the graphics on low. I'm kind of tempted to buy the remastered version and see how much better it looks on my Xbox Series S like a decade later

Yes definitely! Being more of a sandbox game offering different play styles I always gave it a go when I upgraded my PC.

Unfortunately, Crysis 1 is seriously single-thread bottlenecked. It was designed in anticipation of the "10 GHz Pentium 4" school of CPUs that never ended up existing, so it runs like trash even today with high-end hardware.

The remaster does not fix this and actually is a step down in visuals in some respects, due to the ever popular "we remastered from a shitty port that never worked right in the first place". Halo also comes to mind, with the Halo PC version having completely broken shaders and much different weapons balance from the xbox version. In the case of crysis I believe it was the other way around, the game was remastered from the lower-fidelity Xbox version... so it actually is visually worse in some areas.

https://gamerant.com/crysis-remastered-review/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_Az4-2o9AI

Crysis 1 was definitely more fun. Tranq darts, freeze rays, throwing frying pans with Maximum Strength, "hacking" your .ini file to make yourself absurdly overpowered, etc.

But I have to give Crysis 2 credit for its graphics. Compared to 1, it had a smoother, more cinematic quality. I distinctly remember the opening "cutscene" ending and seamlessly transferring control to the player, revealing that it wasn't a prerendered cutscene at all -- they were doing it live! I just sat there stunned for a minute in disbelief.

I'm not really sure which Battlefield you're referring to as "tactical team-based shooter" but it was never any Rainbow Six (3), Swat 3, ARMA or Operation Flashpoint, games I'd consider actual tactical games in the 2000s. Battlefield has always been a bit arcade-y, not not as much as Call of Duty.

Oh man, SWAT 4 was SO good. I miss that game.

A team fan of that game is making a game named "Ready or Not", I didn't played it yet but it has stupid high fan reviews... I saw it reach 98% of approval on Steam or something like that.

Back then to me a "tactical" Battlefield would have been either Battlefield 2(Especially Project Reality) or 2042. Maybe if you only compare it to modern games you could say 1942 was tactical.

Referring to BF1942, I mean tactical in the sense that you had to cooperate on tactics with your team, for example you might spend 10 minutes traversing a hill to flank the enemy. In the modern games, flanking is redundant as you respawn just a few meters from wherever you died.

I guess some individual series have gotten worse. Debatably the monetization models have gotten worse too. But I think game design has generally improved. I loved Half life, but is the gameplay really better than games like Doom Eternal and Titanfall 2?

Yeah I think a lot of commenters here are seeing popular gameplay diverge from the gameplay they prefer. I like the gunplay of Half-Life, Quake, etc, and still fire up openarena with some friends every once in a while, but I spend most of my time playing games with different gun models. Right now I'm busy with Hell Let Loose for example, which is about as far as you can get from the arena shooter gunplay model. People looking for gunplay more like 2004 gaming might want to look into boomer shooters instead

Doom Eternal, sure, the original Doom did not have the sort of forced pace that the newer Doom games do

Everyone says its better, but I don't like it as it forces me to play the game their way, not my way

If we're talking Half-Life2 then one could argue, that it brings in a whole other dimension compared to the two games you mentioned: physics. Something that is almost absent in DE & T2 and has (afaik) no gameplay effect.

I totally agree, seems most FPS today do not come close to the story and gunplay of HL2.

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