Crysis on release was totally broken. As in V1.
I bought it in 2008 long after it released and didn't bother to update it. Just loaded it on and played. It suffered with constant slowdowns, gray outs on the smoke (IE smoke would lose all of its detail and just turn to gray sheets of colour) and so on.
Worst of all though was the total mess up at the end. I don't know if you have ever finished Crysis? I haven't as my game was impossible to complete
I got to the end on the aircraft carrier, went down into its guts and forgot to grab the TAC cannon. Came back up and out and the door slammed shut behind me. I was then treated to close to two hours of
USE THE TAC CANNON... USE THE F***ING TAC CANNON
Before I finally realised I did not have it and was locked out from getting it, making the game impossible to finish. The only way around it was to reload my save game about two hours before and do it all over again.
See, at E3 and IGN they don't bother to play a game long enough to find all of this out. Firstly IGN reviewed GTAIV by basically copying the 360 review word for word before handing it a 9.9/10. A couple of my computer mags I
used to read did exactly the same damn thing. "wow game of the year" etc etc.
Yet none of them noticed it was absolute doggy toffee? Of course they did, they were being paid off. That's the problem with reviewers now days. They're absolutely terrified of biting the hand that feeds. Look at DRIV3R. That got glowing reviews from certain magazines. The reality was it was completely shafted and totally incomplete.
To relieve the situation in Warhead they just cut whacking great lumps out of it. However, compare Crysis' code to say, HL2 or Doom 3 which when they released screamed along like a dragster. Back in those days BFG could say "TURN IT ALL ON !" and actually be safe in the knowing the game would hit over 50fps.
That was all before the dawn of the 360 era. Since then we have been playing lazy hand me down rubbish..
Oh, I also don't rate Crysis much as a game either. Graphically Far Cry 2 is pretty much on par yet you get pretty much double the frames. Shame about the game though.