Crysis 1's arguable purpose was to introduce the Crysis story, right? It seems like a prologue--like the big idea of that game is simply the shock of the discovery of the aliens. Afterward, we still don't really know anything about the Crysis universe.

Now, Crysis 2 takes a baby step forward and teaches us more about the suit and, especially, its relationship with its wearer. And, it lets us shake hands with the Hargreave-Rasch Corporation (but we have yet to hang out with them more personally).

These two games are three years of development apart. Let's say Crytek plan to stretch this out over 10 games. That means it will be 2038 before we know all there is to know about what's going on. Some gamers will probably have died of old age by then.

These thoughts occurred to me as I thought about the more confusing aspects of C2's story, and after I spent some time on this forum, in which other users are also trying to understand the story.

Now, compare what I just said to what a person might say about a television series. After 8 short years, I could probably write Jack Bauer's goddamn memoirs. I think Bungie thought about this, and that's why they crammed the ending of Halo into Halo 3 instead of stretching it out over a bunch of games, as it seemed they would in light of what happened in the first game.

In light of gaming's extremely long dev cycles, game development's style should be to make franchises short (3 games over 9 years seems about right) and each game within them substantial in terms of the chunk of the story it tells. Otherwise, a game's status as art is jeopardized (well, games are at least becoming art, if they aren't all the way there, yet), because either the story is truncated when fans or developers abandon the franchise, or developers give us that "one last game" which has to abruptly close out the story while awkwardly sending the pace into hyperdrive. That said, I think C2 is ridiculous in terms of how awesome it is (I mean this as a major compliment, even though it kind of reads like a back-handed one). I think the knowledge it gave me about the nanosuit is interesting as all hell. Also, it's whetted my appetite for more about Prophet, the Ceph and Hargreave-Rasch. But, it also did a really sadistic job of teasing me (all that vaguery about "we can't die yet," and basically every other thing Prophet said during the ending cut scene). I just don't think I can hang on to this franchise (or any, probably) for longer than a few more games. Chalk that feeling up to my sorry attention span but, hopefully, we get a lot more in terms of story in C3.

Comments? Arguments? Flames?

What the hell did you expect from Crysis 2?
We learned who made the suit, how they got the tech to make it, the true nature of the aliens, where the aliens evolved from, the terrible secret of what the nanosuit does to the wearer, and the true purpose of the nanosuits on Lingshan.
What else do you want?
Crysis 2 is about the suit and the aliens, and that's what we learned about.
The story arc of saving New York has been completed, with lots of interesting characters alive, dead or unknown.

What's the true nature of the aliens? As far as I can tell, we're just made to assume a bunch of things. I'm still not sure whether they were born on Earth and evolved divergently from us or if they flew here a long time ago and never went back home. I'm still not sure why they want to get rid of us, since it doesn't seem like humans and Ceph need the same environment--if there's been room for both races up until 2020, why isn't there enough room for both after 2020? Do they just think we're icky? Based on what happened in C1, it seems like what's happening is like this:

1. A group of mountain lions wander into a town where there aren't usually mountain lions...like Houston.
2. The people in Houston see the mountain lions, freak out and tell everyone else in the world about this incident.
3. Humans decide to kill every mountain lion on the planet.

I think all we know at this point are these:

1. The aliens look like squids and are maladapted to land
2. They like it when it's really cold
3. They don't like us and wish we were all dead
4. They've been on Earth a long time and exist underneath every continent

Right?