Just finished C1, what was Mr Morgan thinking? [SPOILERS]

Post » Fri Dec 31, 2010 12:23 am

Ok... Lots of different viewpoints here and everyone thinks no one else gets it.

So... why change the recipe? None of you quite get the scope of the original plot or the jarring disparity with the sequel.

First off: Tech report. Some sci-fi fluff, theoretical tangents. Need this to set the scene for my argument.

Crysis 1 aliens:

Freeze ray? No. Nothing as brash as that. The intent is not to freeze (kill with cold), it's to harvest energy. That was the defining trait of Crysis 1's aliens. A near perfect ability to harness and harvest energy. Nuke them and they get bigger. Everything was tied into this.
They fired icicles at you because condensing atmospheric water and harvesting heat from it is the most efficient ammunition re-stocking method imaginable.
Their shields could be thought of as artificial null fields, harvesting even the kinetic energy of impacts. How do you think anything could take that many hits without it's shield dropping? An ability like that would mean it charges itself when being hit by physical objects. Heat of explosions would be harvested normally.
The freeze sphere wasn't an area denial weapon, it was the alien equivalent of a solar panel. Not offensive or defensive, just... part of what they use.
This is why Nomad's signal was so devestatingly effective. It knocked out their ability to harvest energy.

Crysis 2 aliens:

Biological warfare. After complete energy control, this becomes the most effective form of warfare. The combat forms aren't the aliens. At all. They contain some alien genetic code in the mix, but from what I gather from the story, these guys play biowar like the Flood, Zerg, Combine, etc. Their combat forms, dropships, pingers are all built from human tissue, reprocessed by the spore. Yet again a strikingly efficient way to go about things, allowing them to pull their own warriors off the front line.

This should have been the cornerstone of the games, but it was ruined by a completely hobbled together excuse for a story, only slightly spit shined by Morgan almost as an afterthought.

I can see a number of 'Morgan-style' characters in this, Hargreave in particular seems almost a copy/paste of Laurens Bancroft from Altered Carbon, a man who has lived many lifetimes, and has directed things from behind the scenes, eventually disconnecting from humanity, thinking them beneath him. Hargreave is the same, less concerned with the outcome than the beauty of the journey, of one man facing impossible odds. He can no longer see anyone but himself as a protagonist.

Hargreave alone should have been enough to make this great, but it was ruined utterly by the way things were done. All the other nanosuits - gone. No explanation. The sole weapon capable of defeating the aliens using Crysis 1 tactics - Nomad's suit signal, Psycho, Rosenthal - nowhere to be found. Not even a passing mention of whether they managed to create an effective long range emitter other than the suit for use by the blockading navy (The only tangible reason I can see for the aliens changing tactics).

We just get the only other interesting character (Prophet) offing himself at the start, where he would make the perfect protagonist.

As for the alien signal to M33... Why is this an either/or situation? They've sent a signal to another place. That does not mean they were alone on that island only, 'they were here before us' doesn't mean they originated here. They could be a lost scouting party who crash landed, lost FTL capability and dug in on the planet waiting for pick-up. Maybe they don't have FTL and travel on generation ships or in stasis. Even more of a reason to dig in, or hibernate. That signal could simply have been asking for the latest Ceph celebrity news for all I know.

They were here. they built their cities, they hibernated, their cities were buried over time, humanity popped up and started poking pointy sticks... welcome to 2023. Hargreave may have even had first contact, opened negotiations and pissed them off with his idiotic decadence.

Bottom line, we still know nothing. Although the current form of the storyline is a tangible development considering what we know of the Ceph to begin with, Crysis 2 will forever be seen as 'that pretty shooter that forgot to make sense'.

Crytek, wake up and smell the ashes, or be left in them when Gabe Newell stops procrastinating about release dates and his weight. At least the 'Mysterious' Combine overlords don't skip the middle of the script to copy Micheal Bay.
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gemma
 
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Post » Fri Dec 31, 2010 2:05 am

And if EVEN THEN you feel like blowing smoke out of your arse, at least provide decent arguments as to why you think Richard Morgan didn't do a good enough job.

Richard Morgan MAY be a decent writer, but it certainly doesn't show in Crysis2.

I am waiting. Have you got an actual, decent complaint about the story? And what does reading have to do with any of this? This is what I said: "As far as story itself is concerned, this is most definitely one of the finest first person shooter games out there." That is what I said. And that is what I meant as well.

Applying what you said to almost every other first person shooter game would mean that 99.9999% (probably actually 100%) of all FPS games have a B rated movie class story.

The only (semi viable) complaint I have seen about the story is that some of the concepts have been done by other mediums and/or games before. So what? What's so horribly, desperately wrong about that? How is that, by any measure, a decent argument on the story being bad? I'm sorry, I just can't see it.

But never mind that, go ahead, please do express your complaints. Or are you one of them bunch that think the first game had a better story? In which case, I don't really care about your complaints. Frankly, then it would be a waste of time for both of us.


Thanks
Iceman
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Shannon Lockwood
 
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Post » Fri Dec 31, 2010 10:47 am

crysis 1 i couldnt get into the story much but the experience of free roaming very high graphics standards and the features it had was good very good but the game story was dull some of the characters was good like major strickland good voice acting btw nomad meh i know he get mixed views but i didnt like the character psycho was a really good character so was prophet everybody else was meh and not memorable to people.

i think it comes down to what people like hell i remember watching lord of the rings the followship and i thought sitting there for 3 hours what is so great about this movie? but alot of people love the movie so it is just matter of opinion just because you dont like the story do not make it a very bad story hell theres people that say they dont even like the star wars story but does it make it a bad story? hell no.
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Aman Bhattal
 
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Post » Thu Dec 30, 2010 8:48 pm

heres a bit of backstory to hargreave: http://crysis.wikia.com/wiki/Jacob_Hargreave
explains a few things but still very vague if you look at the big picture
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Markie Mark
 
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Post » Fri Dec 31, 2010 5:27 am

Didn't Morgan get a book out to explain everything that he kinda forgot about, like blue to red Ceph, why Alcatraz is super mute boy and the epilogue.

Their explanation is that he's got ruptured lungs.
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Ella Loapaga
 
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Post » Fri Dec 31, 2010 7:01 am

Their explanation is that he's got ruptured lungs.



/////SPOILER ALERT////////




Then why does he talk at the end of the game?
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Pawel Platek
 
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Post » Thu Dec 30, 2010 8:51 pm

Their explanation is that he's got ruptured lungs.



/////SPOILER ALERT////////




Then why does he talk at the end of the game?
SPOILER

i may be hearing things i think that voice at the end was prophet voice still from what i gathered prophet is apart of the suit somehow
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Georgine Lee
 
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Post » Fri Dec 31, 2010 11:54 am

FYI guys, when making threads that focus heavy on storyline, please add a [SPOILER] bracket to your thread so as not to ruin it for other people. I've edited this thread to fix it.
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Mr. Allen
 
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Post » Thu Dec 30, 2010 9:30 pm

SPOILER

i may be hearing things i think that voice at the end was prophet voice still from what i gathered prophet is apart of the suit somehow

So, he is using prophets/the suits voice/consciousness through his own (alcatraz's) consciuosness?
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Charlotte X
 
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Post » Fri Dec 31, 2010 7:17 am

If you remember Prophet is now essentially embedded into the suit, and its probably the only way Alcatraz survived...complete Psychological takeover perhaps? The suits nano spores were becoming part of Alcatraz's physical being...

Its a bit out there, but still a possibility...
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Claire
 
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Post » Fri Dec 31, 2010 3:13 am

Well i started reading crysis legion, its the novel from the game, alcatraz explains everything and you can quite literally play the game alongside reading the novel!
It cost me 25NZD. Not a bad read either.
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Nitol Ahmed
 
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Post » Fri Dec 31, 2010 5:39 am

Finished reading the novel.

The book was a very good read(Felt like I was playing the game with words, but with a few flaws compared to the game), the book explained a few things that made me wonder such as why Lockhart hates nanosuits so much, why Alcatraz never talks at all, along with a few other things I can't remember at the moment.

But it still didn't explain the gaps between C1 and C2 nor answer all the questions I've had with C2.

Overall the book is designed to fill 'some' gaps for the C2 story, a good read but don't expect your questions with C1 and C2 be answered in this book.
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Peetay
 
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Post » Fri Dec 31, 2010 9:52 am

Yeah, thanks for editing my thread title without leaving a "thread edited" comment, mr. Big shot CryTek admin. I'm an EA shareholder, don't try to dike me around.
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Alycia Leann grace
 
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Post » Fri Dec 31, 2010 2:50 am

Yeah, thanks for editing my thread title without leaving a "thread edited" comment, mr. Big shot CryTek admin. I'm an EA shareholder, don't try to dike me around.
ORLY?
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Brandon Wilson
 
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Post » Thu Dec 30, 2010 8:34 pm

D-d-d-derailed!
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Sheila Reyes
 
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Post » Fri Dec 31, 2010 11:22 am

Image

Yeah, thanks for editing my thread title without leaving a "thread edited" comment, mr. Big shot CryTek admin. I'm an EA shareholder, don't try to dike me around.

Aaaaand, whats your point? They're still admins, and thats a general rule of thumb for pretty much any forum about any game about any part of the story. Even though none have complained so far doesn't mean it hasn't done something to someone not on this board.

And he was being friendly, not hostile, so the hostile response is rather overkill.

FYI guys, when making threads that focus heavy on storyline, please add a [SPOILER] bracket to your thread so as not to ruin it for other people. I've edited this thread to fix it.

And he did notify us...so whats your point?
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Tha King o Geekz
 
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Post » Fri Dec 31, 2010 9:12 am

Their explanation is that he's got ruptured lungs.



/////SPOILER ALERT////////




Then why does he talk at the end of the game?
SPOILER

i may be hearing things i think that voice at the end was prophet voice still from what i gathered prophet is apart of the suit somehow

Yes it is prophet's voice, but it's not just that. It sounds the exact same as the recording prophet left at the beginning, remember the "They call me prophet. Remember me."
Is it that much of a stretch to say that the nanosuit is just playing that part of the recording through some speakers, to give the illusion of speech and to communicate with other people?
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Ebony Lawson
 
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Post » Fri Dec 31, 2010 10:23 am

Morgan is pathetic cheap writer!

Just read what CRYtics says about his imagination and skills:

Bad science makes bad science fiction: Richard Morgan’s Thirteen fails to impress
Bad science makes bad science fiction
Richard Morgan’s Thirteen fails to impress
Thirteen
Richard K Morgan
Random House, New York, 2007


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Carl Marsalis is a genetically engineered assassin, variant 13. He has been sent to earth from Mars to track a renegade 13 who is loose somewhere on Earth. Marsalis is a gun for hire, forcing resettlement on or killing renegade 13′s on Earth. The action of UK cyberpunk writer Richard Morgan’s novel Thirteen jerks back and forth from the Pacific to the high Andes to Turkey and New York.

One detects in Thirteen shades of Phillip K. dike’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep, better known as the inspiration for the movie Blade Runner. Like dike’s anti-hero Rick Deckard, Carl Marsalis is a genetically engineered assassin sent to kill others of his kind. Like Blade Runner, Thirteen is full of philosophical speculation interspersed with spectacular violence. But there the comparison ends.

In early works of cyberpunk, such as Neuromancer by William Gibson, or John Shirley’s Song Called Youth trilogy, or the work of Rudy Rucker, there is an exuberance and sense of rebellion against injustice and order for the sake of order. Whether it is a last rock and roll concert on the Eiffel Tower in Eclipse, or the streets of Chiba City in Neuromancer, there was a fierce anarchic joy in those 1980′s cyberpunk classics.

In Thirteen, I’m not feeling the joy. Morgan explains, rather ponderously, that the 13′s are free of social constraints:

“Calculated murder is an anti-social act, and it takes special circumstances at either a personal or a social level to enable to capacity. But that’s you people… it’s not any variant thirteen… We’re the violent exiles, the lone-wolf nomads that you bred out of the race back when growing crops and living in one place got so popular. We don’t have, we don’t need a social context.”

Morgan’s theory is that modern man is an effeminized, wimpy and cowardly, degenerate race because all the true alpha males were exterminated and bred out. Thus, confusingly, his thirteens, though sociopathic loners, deficient in empathy, are somehow also charismatic leaders and irresistible to women. Women, we are made to understand by Morgan, really want to subordinate themselves to the strongest male.

Morgan is drawing on the work of Richard Wrangham as popularized by Matt Ridley in his book Nature Via Nurture. Wrangham was a student of primatologist Jane Goodall. Wrangham focused on interpersonal (inter-ape?) violence in his 1996 book, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Wrangham’s book, and Morgan’s fictionalization of Wrangham’s ideas as construed by Ridley have several problems. Chimpanzees are not ancestral humans any more than humans are ancestral chimps. They are, if you would, cousins. Among the chimps that Goodall studied at Gombe there were many examples of apparent altruism, trust, and loyalty; these virtues get short shrift among the adherents of primal human nature as essentially nasty and brutish.

Cyberpunk is often a delight to read because of its reimagining of a familiar world, the world of today. Lights are brighter, mirror-shades shinier and even commonplace objects are re-imagined and re-contextualized in works such as Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age.

In Thirteen, the places we visit are not well-imagined or well-described. For instance, Morgan’s scenes in the alteplano, or high plains of Peru and surrounding countries, are almost generic. We don’t smell the smells of the dusty street. We don’t see the remaining Incan roads, terraces and canols, ancient walls joined without a trace of mortar. We don’t hear the llama’s and old cars in the narrow streets. We don’t see the women in their colorful vests, long braids, long skirts, and funky hats. We don’t learn what people eat (aside from whisky). We don’t see the festivals like Oruro’s la Diablada (Dance of the Devils) even though such a scene might have dovetailed well with Morgan’s preoccupation with humans who are or become monsters. We know we are in New York or Turkey later on in the story only because we are told that we are there.

In short, Morgan’s prose is not merely plodding, predictable, and average. It is downright boring. His best ideas seem to have been lifted from the works of better writers such as John Brunner’s 1975 The Shockwave Rider and dike’s 1968 Electric Sheep. For instance, Thirteen’s United States is fragmented into three states, a Pacific Rim, old Northeast and “Jesusland”. This internet meme is attributed to G Webb of yakyak.org by Morgan; but it is quite similar to ideas about the fragmentation and tribalization of the future US in Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider.

The UK title of Thirteen is Black Man. And Carl Marsalis, despite being a genetically engineered super/sub-human, apparently looks like a modern black man. There is a good bit of seemingly overt racism in the book as when Carl is beaten unconscious, apprehended and thrown into a Jesusland jail. Morgan tries to soften the Nazi-ish tinge of his twin themes of racial destiny and will with a dedication that says that he hates “bigotry, cruelty, and injustice with an unrelenting rage”. One wonders then why he has found it necessary to construct a novel in which such traits are seen as genetically endowed survival mechanisms. That Marsalis is a symbol of the fears of white society that the black man is a subhuman violent brute who is after “their women” is one thing; but the black man, Marsalis in Morgan’s book really is a sociopathic, back-bred pre-human. Who just happens to look like a black man. Would Morgan have called his novel “White Man” and made his anti-hero an exaggeratedly virile, violent, sociopathic white man?

Richard’s Morgan’s Thirteen is poorly written fiction based on dubious science. The interested reader is advised to find instead a nice copy of The Shockwave Rider or Neuromancer or A Song Called Youth or any of Phillip dike’s novels.

Copyright ? 2007, 2008 Henry Edward Hardy

Seems like Crytek have bad taste, because they selected this pathetic writer and followed his pathetic "imagination"... i mean list of pathetic cliches.

Just look what this moron said about other games, and what he was saying about Crysis 2
http://www.1up.com/news/richard-morgan-writing-crysis-2
http://www.destructoid.com/crysis-2-s-story-bringing-massive-emotional-charge--170470.phtml
http://t.co/nvKcIUi
http://www.nowgamer.com/features/638/crysis-2-richard-morgan-qa

Games he bashed was not so good in writing, i can agree with that, but this man really have non better writing skills than writers of Halo or Modern Warfare 2, but he is full of **** and thinks he is so cool, when in fact he isn't.
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Lucie H
 
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Post » Fri Dec 31, 2010 10:14 am


Seems like Crytek have bad taste, because they selected this pathetic writer and followed his pathetic "imagination"... i mean list of pathetic cliches.

Just look what this moron said about other games, and what he was saying about Crysis 2
http://www.1up.com/news/richard-morgan-writing-crysis-2
http://www.destructoid.com/crysis-2-s-story-bringing-massive-emotional-charge--170470.phtml
http://t.co/nvKcIUi
http://www.nowgamer.com/features/638/crysis-2-richard-morgan-qa

Games he bashed was not so good in writing, i can agree with that, but this man really have non better writing skills than writers of Halo or Modern Warfare 2, but he is full of **** and thinks he is so cool, when in fact he isn't.

Wow, talk about bad form. Any writer who trashes his/her immediate contemporaries (those working within the same genre, no less) is automatically a dike, but okay, I'll give him that Mw2's storyline is blockbuster cheese. Even so, if he's going to be flinging poo at other writers, he'd better be damn sure he's about to put out a brilliant piece of work. Crysis 2 is not that. I'm still not entirely sure that's Morgan's fault, because undoubtedly Crytek controlled the direction of whatever script Morgan turned in, but now I'm hearing that he plagiarized his own previous works, and he's still got the nerve to put himself up on a pedestal for all these gaming websites.... dude needs to learn some humility.
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Nice one
 
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Post » Thu Dec 30, 2010 7:44 pm

Seems like Crytek have bad taste, because they selected this pathetic writer and followed his pathetic "imagination"... i mean list of pathetic cliches.

Just look what this moron said about other games, and what he was saying about Crysis 2
http://www.1up.com/news/richard-morgan-writing-crysis-2
http://www.destructoid.com/crysis-2-s-story-bringing-massive-emotional-charge--170470.phtml
http://t.co/nvKcIUi
http://www.nowgamer.com/features/638/crysis-2-richard-morgan-qa

Games he bashed was not so good in writing, i can agree with that, but this man really have non better writing skills than writers of Halo or Modern Warfare 2, but he is full of **** and thinks he is so cool, when in fact he isn't.

And I thought hypocrites making fools of themselves publicly mainly happened on news networks.

Taken from the 1st link:
(talking about MW2) "What I thought when I played it was, 'Jesus guys, what have you been doing? You've not ramped anything up. The story is worse and the game doesn't really hang together, it's just a bunch of mission levels."

Any1 else think that sounds like C2?

Further down:
Crysis 2, meanwhile, is set in a ravaged New York City under assault of an alien invasion, with a story that Crytek promises will feature "gritty characters, a rich back-story, and plot twists rarely found in video games."

Oh look, another broken promise. Characters were arguably boring, back story was never explained, and a plot twist completely copied from Fallout NV.
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Stephani Silva
 
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Post » Thu Dec 30, 2010 7:31 pm

The comics are supposed to fill in the story between Crysis 1 and 2. Also, I read on here that someone found an artifact on a desk and underneath it it said "Returned from the Lingshan Islands by Dr Helena Rosenthal".
Here's a link for ya'll: http://www.encroyable.com/2011/03/22/crysis-2-comic-announced/

“Earth, 2020. United States Special Forces Major Laurence “Prophet” Barnes and the soldiers of Raptor Team thought their deployment on the Lingshan islands was a basic covert op against North Korean forces. But they couldn’t be more wrong. What archaeologists awakened on the island had lain buried for millions of years, and was utterly hostile to human life. Now an alien race are stirring, first contact has turned into humanity’s worst nightmare, and Prophet’s squad are the last remaining survivors. Only one real question remains – can Prophet get his people off Lingshan alive, and back to civilization in time to warn the rest of the human race what’s on its way.”

So it looks like Nomad and Pyshco will be alive for that start of the comics. They start in June and released monthly. There will be six of them.
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Chris Ellis
 
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Post » Thu Dec 30, 2010 8:35 pm

It's been said multiple times, if you have to fill the plot holes with a seperate book, or a comic, you've already failed.
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sara OMAR
 
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