Crysis (series)/Headscratchers


 * Why did they have to go with playing as Psycho in Warhead? Playing as Prophet could have been far more interesting - we could have found out how he got hold of that alien weapon.
 * Playing as Prophet would be interesting, but what I liked about Warhead was the fact that we got to see how Psycho managed to bring down and bring back an entire intact alien vehicle.
 * Playing Prophet would have spoiled the story. We still don't know what exactly happened to him.
 * I was somewhat disappointed that Warhead starts after the taking of the harbor and after Pyscho and Nomad had parted. I was rather hoping to play the other end of rescuing the hostage and sniping near the Cruiser, not to mention show what happened to psycho during much of the game.
 * I really don't get how nanoprobes get into one's bloodstream through your pores. Then again, every time a zit is popped, it bleeds, so I don't know.
 * Though skin is quite airtight, pores can come very close to blood vessels under your skin and it wouldn't be too difficult for advanced nanomachines to perhaps burrow from the pore into your bloodstream. Zits can come from inflamed pores and popping a zit usually does damage to blood vessels around the pore.
 * The suit bonds with the user's body. Think of it as a sentient second skin. It can probably connect with blood vessels directly.
 * Exactly what problems arise from Koreans speaking Korean on higher difficulties?
 * If you can't understand Korean, you won't be able to pick up cues from the orders they're radioing/shouting.
 * Yes. When every single thing the bad guys say is potentially "There he is! Get him!", some sections of the game become a lot more nervy. If you knew they were just discussing the weather, things would be different.
 * They also shout out when they throw grenades. Grenades instant kill you, so, it's good to know.
 * What did us New Yorkers do to piss off every kaiju/alien invasion fleet/etc?
 * You made the city so hot in the summer yet freezing in the winter.
 * Do you know nothing of fiction? New York is a giant American bullseye, just waiting for some roving force of destruction to come and flatten its nice, tall buildings full of soft and squishy humans. That, and bombed-out cities look cool.
 * Well, you need a massive city to justify all those office towers, and you need a first-world nation to get as many explosions as possible and/or show how terrible the threat is. It also has to be somewhere easily identifiable, the sort of place that everybody in the world knows about even if they've never been so much as interested in it. What do we have left? Tokyo! New York!
 * Maybe the aliens only invade islands.
 * Well, their main weapon in Crysis needed humidity to work.
 * The Ceph had a base under New York, the public wasn't even sure they were aliens since they apparently rose up from under ground, and the Ceph seem to have bases all over the planet all near coastlines
 * The epilogue of Crysis 2 shows the Ceph had bases all over the world.
 * It just bugs me that in Crysis 2 the main character has to kill all of those CELL troopers just over a simple misunderstanding that he is infected and has to be put down. Can't he just, like, walk to the nearest patrol, remove his helmet and say: "Hey, guys! I'm not the Prophet, I'm a totally different random uninfected dude! Let's go have a pizza!" or something like that?
 * Well, no, he can't.  Also, Lockhart really wants him dead.
 * That, and,
 * On another note, I doubt they would even care that much. We are talking about the PMC that slaughtered a lot of the civvies that the Ceph didn't kill after all.
 * Also, keep in mind that Lockhart hates Alcatraz/Prophet for the sole reason that he's wearing a nanosuit. He thoroughly hates the nanosuit project to an irrational degree (he had a nephew that was killed during testing and in Legion he formally testified in front of Congress to get the project shut down - unsuccessfully), and is convinced that the nanosuit is partially responsible for spreading the plague. He's not really going to care if the guy in the suit is named "Prophet" or "Alcatraz." It's a guy in a nanosuit, so as far as Lockhart is concerned, he needs to die.
 * The aliens in Crysis 2 don't even seem like the same species as those in the first game. Aside from looking completely different, remember how the aliens in Crysis needed cold temperatures to survive, so they went around freezing everything? Did they somehow manage to evolve over three years?
 * The aliens are only different in their color; other than that, it's their equipment that's different. Look closely at the Ceph grunts; those are the things you see in the zero-g level in the first game floating around, but wearing powered armor that makes them functionally bipedal instead of functionally flying octopii. (They're certainly not just blue to pink pallette swaps, but the physical differences beyond color are easily attributable to Art Evolution. In fact, the WMG about the Ceph having different nationalities like humans do can explain that just as much as the color and equipment.) Also, I don't think Crysis said they needed cold tempertures to survive, they may just prefer it, or it may have been a part of their hibernation process. Or maybe they do need it, but the Applied Phlebotinum they build their armor with is good enough to protect them from warmer climates without being a full enclosure.
 * No just... no. They're clearly totally different they have entirely different head structures, they're entirely different colors, they're skeletons appear totally different, they're shaped in a completely different ways. At some point Art Evolution ceases to be a viable explanation to explain the massive and numerous dissimilarity, as there is frankly almost NOTHING linking the two versions together. Indeed if one removed the very meager references to Lingshen you could reasonably conclude that this is acutally a second entirely unrelated alien invasion such is the drastic and unexplained shift in appearance, technology, and tactics. This was a huge plot hole that bugged me and most others I talked too as there is simply no adequate explanation given in game. The difference is drastic enough to make a reasonable argument that it's out of continuity with Crysis 1 and is some sort of AU.
 * Nice job passing your opinion off as fact, there. I didn't have any problem accepting the difference as a design Retcon at the absolute most, so, obviously, you're wrong. Sarcasm aside, since when are aliens not being Planet of Hats a plot hole? I'd also like to know how you're making your observations on the sequel's aliens, considering their faces are all covered, you can't see them beyond the back of their heads, necks, and a small amount below, and in neither game do they even have skeletons. The largest difference is a lack of articulation in the chest area, which is the kind of thing a modeler and/or texture artist would cut down on when designing with multi-platform in mind. It's not a leap of art to look at this and imagine that this is the same thing but wearing clothes instead of naked, with the color difference, in particular, because it's either a different nationality, a result of being in a different climate, or just plain suffering a visual Retcon.
 * Doesn't work. There's no way a creature used to double-digit Kelvin temperatures (the sphere is 200 below, we're told, meaning the liquid in the ship could actually be nitrogen rather than water) would be able to essentially walk around half naked; to its metabolism, it would be like walking into a blast furnace, and there's no way it could function with things that are supposed to be liquids flashboiling into gases inside it. It makes about as much sense as sending a human to the bottom of the Marianas Trench in a Speedo. Nevermind that we saw thousands of alien gunships streaming away from Lingshan which then totally disappeared, or the amazingly silly idea that an obviously aquatic species would be burrowers with "lithoships" (how did nobody ever find one of these, despite them apparently being all over the world?) as opposed to the Lingshan object being a crashed ship buried under a mountain and causing quakes as it tried to start up again. Put simply, they got rid of the squids because the organic shapes and complex animated tentacles were too much for consoles. Same with the freezing; it's replaced with bioweapons because the ice levels were infamously graphically demanding in the original. If I remember rightly, the Sphere was a result of their power generating system, which somehow draws energy from their surroundings; the cold is a result of the ship powering up, but it does appear to be a natural state for them, since Nomad certainly didn't comment that the command rooms he encountered with very much not hibernating aliens in them were warmer. About the only connections between the two games are Prophet, vague mentions of Lingshan and Strickland, the look of the aliens under their suits, and the tunnel-transit system in the Lingshan spaceship being used (for no apparent reason) to lift Alcatraz up the spore tunnels and fart him out. Same lack of consistency with most things, such as the Nanosuit (it was developed by DARPA in the original, and was so not-secret that Nanosuited soldiers were free to mingle with regulars in units and aboard the carrier), Korea (seemingly vanished entirely), the US military wanting to nuke the aliens even though it didn't work the first time, going back to helicopters with the US' advanced VTOL aircraft barely appearing...It's interesting (and telling) that the game lists a writer but not a continuity editor. It even deliberately misuses scenes from the original, such as claiming a shot of Aztec's suit burning up showed him being "used up" rather than being Prophet himself remotely destroying the suit because Aztec was dead and it couldn't be allowed to fall into enemy hands.
 * Most of the differences could be chocked up to unreliable narrator. If we accept that the suits are mechanical symbiotes rather than nonliving armor, that opens a whole new door on the narrator of the first: Nomad. When they reuse the burning scene and Prophet claims it's people being used up he may not be wrong. Imagine you're a cheap knock-off of the Venom suit from Spiderman. You need a living host who is preferably not freaking out over the horrible parasite that encases him, so when you see one of your bretheren burning its useless partner up, you would logically fake a message from Prophet claiming a remote vaporization. Your hosts blame their crappy government for not coming up with a better solution, and move on. Other things like the translation convention, or even the color of the enemies, can be attributed to the suits altering the players' perceptions from time to time. The flipside is that Prophet really might have vaporized his comrades and is feeling sad about it, so he lies about the suits using them up. After all, Crysis 2 calls them Symbiotic, not Parasitic. Only a Parasite "uses up" a host.
 * The Celph in the two games appear to be the results of differing technological evolutionary paths. One can imagine that two Transhuman societies that developed their technology in different directions (say, one oriented toward biotech and one toward cybernetics) would look and act dramatically different. The Celph appear to be a trans...er, alien society. The Celph encountered in the Pacific are simply a different group from those encountered in New York, with different technology and likely different biology due to physical/genetic alterations.
 * But why would one species have a metabolism clearly suited to temperatures that don't exist on earth and never have, while the other is just fine walking around in armour which leaves them at least half naked at room temperature? The Ceph in the first game are clearly aliens. The Ceph in the second seem more like a dormant ancient Earth species.
 * They're aliens with phlebotinum; accepting that their armor magically takes care of their biological needs (or that their biological needs are outside the bounds of human understanding, if we want to dig to the bottom of the barrel for handwaves) despite not offering a complete covering is less of a stretch than accepting that the first game's nanosuit should even have had distinctive strength and speed modes, which by all logic should be the same thing. This is like complaining that Bioware giving the party in Mass Effect 2 unique costumes has the drawback of making their spaceware absurd, except worse, because they did it with humans, not aliens. One of the strengths of speculative fiction is the ability to say "it just works like that" while moving on instead of getting hung up on reality. I also don't buy for a minute that pure consolization is to blame for the lack of another ice sphere; there's no reason they couldn't have simply dumbed down the special effects like they did with many other things, they're certainly clever enough at design to have made good enough use of lower resolution textures and less precise shaders that side-by-side comparisons to the first game will show very little difference unless the camera is pointing straight at certain flat surfaces from two feet away. Surely I'm not the only one who remembers that when the first game was new, the overwhelming majority of reactions were condemning the developers for the hardware requirements, and of those who actually played it, there was an equally large backlash over the section inside the sphere because fighting the Ceph was like fighting any old FPS enemy from ten years ago compared to the more fun human enemies (notice that the Ceph having bipedal armor now gives them an excuse to move like humans, if superpowered, thus addressing this complaint?) As far as the KPA goes, what about them? Why should they be anywhere near New York city, and why would we hear anything about them while playing as a character in a military force sent on a mission into an American city that's suffering a communications blackout? Why would anyone care about their nanosuits when they're not the current threat and when they're "cheap knockoff's" (not really supported mechanically, but from the visual design looking more clunky I take Nomad's statement at face value) Hargreave didn't design, thus excluding them in the CryNet suit's role in stopping the Ceph? How do we know they're even accurate enough duplicates to have the same effects on the user? The Excuse Plot for the first game's multiplayer was US and KPA forces fighting it out over alien forces that had been shot down in various places all over the world, so that's what North Korea's been up to, and there's your answer about what happened to the rest of the Lingshan fleet. The nuke: the target is, as this discussion is based around, a differently functioning target than the original, and there's no evidence it has the same immunity to nuclear weapons; there's no evidence it doesn't, either, but the upper ranks of the military are not painted favorably in the game. If they order half of Manhattan sunk as a measure against the Ceph, it's not a leap of logic to think whoever's in charge can see ample justification for resorting to nuclear weapons despite the Lingshan oops. It's like an offscreen version of the SecDef from Independance Day, seeing that nuclear weapons didn't scratch a citybuster but trying to convince the president that other strikes might have "more luck" and they shouldn't just give up on one failure.
 * Nonsense, speed and strength are obviously going to be different; if what you said was true, every sprinter would also be a champion long jumper, swimmer, hurdler and weightlifter. There are vastly different physical needs for rapidly moving your legs versus lifting and tossing a washing machine; it's wholly correct that the rapid-movement mode and lift-big-things-jump-high mode are different.
 * Crysis: Legion pretty much outright says that the Ceph as we know them are not a "normal" species. The novel indicates that the Ceph are likely some variant of a bio-engineered species created by a vastly more advanced society, essentially their equivalent of a very militant gardening service, or maybe sapient gardening tools. If this does hold true, then the differences between the Ceph are nowhere near as illogical as you're saying they are. A species with the kind of technology the "true" Ceph are indicated to have would be able to easily alter the biology of their "gardeners" or tools to suit the needs of the area they're operating in.


 * Is it just me, or is Hargreave suspiciously similar to a certain character in Fallout: New Vegas?
 * It's not just you, and I think the resemblance is inflated by the rarity of the Howard Hughes archetype; New Vegas may have started something of a trend with Mister House, and House is going to be the "it's just like _____" example for awhile now.
 * I just called him Lord Bähbem.
 * In Crysis the Marines had Future Force Warrior equipment, In Crysis 2 they're all in current military uniforms
 * Maybe the Marines are stretched so thin that they couldn't afford/make enough equipment for everyone.
 * That doesn't really make sense, since the US seems to have been hiring PMCs to do the cleanup operation rather than having the Marines do it. There's no hint in Crysis 2 that anything is happening anywhere but New York.
 * Yes there is. The intro movie indicates widespread panic-rioting in other cities, including LA. Coupled with the blanket media blackout and indications that there's a number of overseas military operations happening at the same time as the Ceph attack in New York, and it is quite possible that the US military is being stretched very thin. The CELL mandate in New York may be because they can't get any military into New York because they're stretched so thin.
 * It makes some amount of sense; one of the radio broadcasts is a debate about how CELL, on the one hand, behaves exactly like the pirate DJ describes them but how, on the other hand, they cost the taxpayers less money in the cities they've been used in, so we know that money is a driving force behind the set-up beyond the corporate level. It could be that the money to pay for CELL contracts is coming out of the military's budget.
 * It's been stated that the Marines you encounter are only there to evacuate civilians; maybe they didn't bother suiting up so they could leave the equipment for those fighting in the front lines?
 * How does Gould find ALWAYS conveniently enemies-free alternate routes to meet Alcatraz in X place, and how doesn't get killed? Looks as if the guy had super sneaking abilities, better than having a nanosuit with permanent cloaking!
 * The only times he does this is when he's sneaking out of the apartment or into the CELL facility, and in both of those cases he has Alcatraz providing a nice, big distraction (in fact, that was the entire point behind Alcatraz blowing up the fuel tents at the CELL outpost near the church, as that drew off most of the CELL guards, and Alcatraz's rooftop attack drew off the rest). In all of the other cases he has a nice big Marine escort nearby to protect him.
 * Granted, he had Alcatraz create diversions so he can get through safely, and he had Marine escort most of the time. But in 'Gate Keepers' he goes on his own, even if CELL was drawn away from his path, he still could have encountered aliens... I guess guy was just lucky.
 * And he had a pistol. Not much, but these are squid he's shooting.


 * Why don't we get any CELLulites (to quote Legion) using the MP version of the Nanosuit? Could have made for interesting Wolfpack Bosses, a nice Call Back to the KPA 'suits or the role they played and provided more actual use for Cloak Tracker other than
 * Probably because Lockhart has a raging hatredboner for the nanosuits and anything related to them. He would never allow any man under his command to use a nanosuit.
 * Can't believe I forgot that. Still a damn pity though, wish the Ceph had deployed something similar sooner than endgame.
 * Oh, wait, Lockhart maybe not, but there's a period between when Hargreave traps you and you get to meet him when there are still hostile CELL operators. What about those?
 * Hargreave's men likely don't have nanosuits because they're ostensibly Lockheart's until they start going at each others' throats.
 * The main article says, . Prophet's suit in the first game looks identical to theirs, it's never said that it's different, . At one point of the game, Hargrieve says:  . Trying to answer my own question, when Prophet , did his
 * Legion makes it clear that the Nanosuit in the second game is different from the ones in the first game. Prophet appears to have changed suits between the games (or the 2.0 suit is a direct evolution of the 1.0 due to Prophet's exposure to Ceph tech)
 * It's stated that putting on a nanosuit turns you into a "dead man walking". Exactly what that means is never explicitly elaborated on. The most sensible explanation based on what's seen in the game seems to be that once you wear a nanosuit for long enough, you're no longer able to take it off, as it's a symbiotic lifeform that eventually bonds to your body.
 * Legion makes it clear that the nanosuit starts "recycling" your body by eliminating tertiary and unnecessary organs that it feels you don't need, and repurposing your biomatter to make you more efficient. The process is faster if you're injured, either before putting the suit on or while wearing it. Alcatraz was in pretty bad shape and the suit started growing into whatever parts of his body needed to be replaced to support him, while recycling dead or useless tissue ("well, half the kidney is gone, so let's just scrap the whole thing," etc.) to rebuild essential organs. By the end, the nanosuit wearer is just a hunk of meat and organs threaded with nanotech fibers supporting the suit itself.
 * How does the suit determine what isn't needed? Shouldn't the suit recognize that its host might need things like its lungs, heart, liver, etc. in order to continue living. Does the suit have something against the host not being a part of it and being treated like a suit of armor, is that why it tries to replace organic parts with "better" bio-mechanical parts? The need to be one with its host makes the nano-suit sound like Venom from Spiderman.
 * The suit is smart. Very, very smart. Being reverse-engineered tech from a species for whom the Ceph are gardeners/gardening tools, this shouldn't be a surprise. SECOND also recognizes the objective it is given and takes steps to complete that objective; if the wearer is damaged or has damaged parts, it repairs/repurposes them. And at one point in the novel, Alcatraz is trying to do something the suit considers detrimental to its objectives, and it overrides him (which pisses him off to an epic degree).
 * So is comparing the nano-suit with the Venom Symbiotic life-form from Spider-Man an accurate comparison? Venom was able to talk and interact with its host on a personal level and expressed a very clear desire to be permanently bonded with its host. Is the suit implied to be able to interact with its host and cares for it, or is it just an AI that has set program parameters to follow?
 * Why didn't the nuke destroy the aliens near the end of the original Crysis? Even the most low yield nuclear explosion (which isn't saying much as any nuke is powerful) can reach millions of degrees and would be able to level a city sized area into a gaping crater. Even if the force field could (which it does) defend against the force and heat of the blast it shouldn't be able to so efficiently absorb the energy generated by the explosion. Hell if the aliens are vulnerable to conventional weaponry than a nuke should have been overkill.
 * Why shouldn't it? The Ceph are Sufficiently Advanced Aliens, after all.
 * Well it is just that all of that explosive heat energy and radiation being dispersed through the air should be too chaotic to focus into any sort of useable energy, and even if that is possible the energy absorption shouldn't occur literally seconds after the explosion just ended (the mushroom cloud should have lasted longer than it did as all that superheated air takes a lot longer than a few seconds to disperse). Also if nuclear explosions made the Ceph stronger how in the hell did Nomand defeat them with a Tactical Nuclear Grenade Launcher?
 * Two possible hypothesises as two how that works. First is that the sphere becomes cryogenic cold by absorbing heat from it's area of effect. Therefore the aliens can be killed using kinetic and incendiary weapons outside the sphere. Second is that the nuclear missile was too low yield to deal any effective damage to Lingshan.
 * Hargreave's response towards Lockhart claiming that he would kill him was suitably epic to be sure, "Better men then you have tried. Better men than you, and things so far beyond men you can't begin to imagine them." But how is that possible, hasn't he been in cryogenic stasis for several decades? When did he have an opportunity to have encounters with all these men who wanted him dead and apparently even some of the Ceph aliens.
 * Remember Tunguska, South America and Siberia. As for better men, every oversuccessful human on earth has eventually faced someone antagonistic enough to attempt an assasination on him/her.
 * Well to me the way it was worded implied to me that Hargreave fought the Ceph aliens and may perhaps have fought in some of the many wars that occurred in the 20th century. When I learned more about his backstory, how he more or less just stumbled upon aliens that were in hibernation, and how he had been a businessman up until he cryogenically froze himself in his old age, made me wonder what he meant by that sentence. It seems unlikely to me that he had such an eventful life that he has had numerous men and aliens try to kill him.
 * Why Did not Hargreave make a spare nanosuit 2 for himself, copy the anti-spore program from Prophet/Alcatraz's nanosuit to the spare and use it for himself? it would be awesome to be able to play as Hargreave in Crysis 2, or any of the sequels-to-be. It would also allow more character development and backstory explanation on Hargreave's part.
 * Prophet casually claims that the nano-suit is a 1 billion dollar project. If the nano-suit 2.0 is really so much greater than the original that Hargreave believes it can save the world than it is probably a great deal more expensive than the original. However funding shouldn't be a problem as he has been a businessman for over a hundred years and he should have connections with the American Government meaning he has private and public funds to work with. If it really is so important that it can save the world then making more than 1 should have been a priority.
 * Creating one suit took an enormous amount of resources, and this was prior to Hargreave getting blacklisted within his own corporation, and then the Ceph showed up. He probably wanted to make more - they made a number of the 1.0 versions - but ran out of time.
 * Note that it isn't an issue of making another 2.0 suit. There are other 2.0 suits out there. The issue is that it's Prophet's suit that is special because its the only one that managed to get into the lithoship underneath Central Park. Afterward, Prophet tried to extract Gould, and doesn't truly trust Hargreave after the whole "post-human warrior" speech, so Hargreave couldn't just copy the changes and data in the suit. Plus Prophet was losing control of himself to the virus and the Ceph, so he couldn't return even if he did trust Hargreave. Hargreave could have used a 2.0 suit for himself, but if he did, he wouldn't be able to use Prophet's, which was the one that had been processing both the samples from the Central Park lithoship, the Ceph tissue samples, the samples from the spear dispersal device near City Hall, and all of the data Prophet acquired from Lingshan, and was the only suit that could properly capitalize on the Tunguska Iteration.
 * As the novel of Crysis 2 states the aliens thus far encountered in the series would be the equivalent of a gardener hired by a rich person to cut some weeds (humans in this case), the gardener is so far below his boss that he isn't worth being compared to him. If this is true then how did Hargreave expect his nano-suits to win; those nano-suits were only barely superior to the "gardeners" how are these nano-suit warriors going to kill the "boss"?
 * The suit is sentient. Properly programmed, it starts devising strategies and combinations to help it's allies/wearers (humans in this case). It can levelup just like any shapeshifting boss. And then there is the humanized alien spore.
 * The nanosuit is no more supposed to win a war than the M1 Garand was supposed to win World War II. It is, however, a start along the process to advancing humanity to the point where it might be able to defend itself against the Ceph, and eventually to defend against whatever created them. The first weapon you build is not going to win the war.
 * This may just be the Call of Duty/Battlefield (those are the main First Person Shooters I play) fan in me speaking, but it seems to me that you die a lot faster in comparison to those games. A few bursts from an enemy at close range? Dead in seconds. Explosion go off by you? Instant death every time. The suit may provide speed, invisibility, and increased strength, but in terms of armor the nano-suit doesn't really seem like it's any more durable than normal body armor. The intro cutscene portrays it as a bullet sponge and explosions only burn the outer layers a little bit; why can't the armor be like that in-game.
 * I found the suit capable of much more punishment, you just also happen to have a lot more flying at you at once in Crysis than CoD or Battlefield. The enemies use better tactics like staggering fire and concentrated group fire to deal lots of damage to you due to Crysis' (usually) better and more sophisticated AI. Also, did you use Armor Mode often? It runs out of power pretty quickly in 2 before the upgrade, but it can take quite a punishment.
 * The suit is like that in-game, you just have to activate armor mode. The key thing to remember is that, in its default state, the suit is set up purely for mobility. Default mode is "Power" mode which places emphasis on movement, speed, jumping, sliding, and strength. This mode has very limited resistance to incoming fire. When you switch to "Armor" mode, that is when the suit becomes an impervious monster. Its performance is further boosted once you unlock and upgrade the Deflection option, which is a passive buff across all three modes but which greatly helps with survivability in those rough spots. Fire up Armor with Deflection and you're a mobile tank, even on Post-Human Warrior difficulty.
 * Is there any particular reason why Marine MP Nanosuits are brown? Or is it only because urban camo grey was taken by CELL?
 * It might be because the Marines were wearing Desert MARPAT uniforms in the campaign, so their nanosuit's colouration in MP is probably due to that.