All Crysis 2 did was take that space and reduced it to an reasonable degree which could more or less be called the combat area.
And that's why it faded out into the crowd amongst the rest of the mediocre fps games. Personally I used the large open spaces in the first, and had a lot of fun doing so. And I'm sure a lot of other people did too.
It's going the extra mile that makes a good thing an extraordinary thing.