How good it will look when you get close to it, but the majority of gamers aren't specifically looking at items they get close to or looking at them to see how close to realistic the texture is. To the people who care about small things like that and think that in this age pixelated messes shouldn't be acceptable it is.
But what people I don't think get when they see people bitch is that they aren't just bitching that "Oh these graphics don't look as good as they can be they should be better QQ", it's more of "Why should I have to pay more for a game that they didn't put the time into that takes a legitimate step back from their previous game that this is a sequel to." In Crysis, not everything was perfect but the majority of things when you got close to them didn't become so poor as some do in this game. And it's not everything in this game that does, but the amount that does is way higher than Crysis, and it sucks to see a good company that was known for quality work going down the road of cutting corners like every other dev now.
Here are some examples and I know not everything is bad or this bad but too much is imo and a lot of other peoples'.
Most people see this as a corner to hide before for cover but when I see something like this I can't help but think of nintendo 64 and the devs just being lazy/not caring about putting any work into the PC version after porting over the console version.
http://oi54.tinypic.com/14jnpf9.jpg
This is an SS from Crysis 1. Everything in the picture has clear definition, and even the tiny text on the paper on the wall doesn't look overly blurry. http://img857.imageshack.us/img857/1642/screenshot0000.jpg But then something like this from Crysis 2, it just looks like they took a picture blew it up and pasted it on something and it's all pixelated. http://img835.imageshack.us/img835/153/crysis22011032615270927.png
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4227541/c2_terrain.jpg There's no reason to have something THAT bad in a game with "Crysis" in the title, it just shouldn't be happening. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4227541/c2_terrain_character.jpg A comparison of the terrain to the character model just showing that somethings they did do really nicely, but some places they decided "Fuck it, it doesn't matter".
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4227541/c1_pier.jpg http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4227541/c2_pier.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4227541/ce3_waves.jpg http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4227541/c2_waves.jpg Screen shot from a Crytek demo showing off Cryengine 3s new water ripple, vs what is actually in the game.
I could keep going on and finding screenshots and I'm sure you can find ones to argue the opposite way, but I'll quote someone from the mycrysis forums "It breaks immersion, and is just annoying". Also all of the crysis 2 SSs are on the highest settings.
Edit: I realize I went off on a tangent and went from "what half the texture res means" to defending people bitching about it being "bad"
so...TLDR: It means things still won't be as clear as they should/could be if they weren't "half" the size. Take the first 2 pics I posted. If pic 1 is Crysis 2 on console and that's how the danger sign looked, then on PC with not "half the size textures" it should have been as clear as the paper from Crysis 1, but instead they just used the same shit for every platform.
Edit2: Trigun I don't think it's being elitist or wanting some bragging right that your PC can run it better and make it look better. I don't see why when someone is upset about a company not making as good quality a game as they should have, and actually taking significant steps back from the previous game. I think it's a legitamate cause to be unhappy when you were shown previews of a game looking like the on picture of him shooting the water, but actually getting the second picture of it looking like shit. It breaks immersion, it's a let down, and quite frankly it's paying more for a worse quality game.
As for turning off bloom I think it is the most ridiculously awful thing to ever grace video games. It doesn't look good and it doesn't make things look realistic. It takes light reflecting off items to a ludicrously unbelievable level. http://steamcommunity.com/id/lunatics/screenshot/595806845330531452 is without bloom on, vs http://steamcommunity.com/id/lunatics/screenshot/595806845329977037/? with it on. How is that not ugly = \.
As for turning off bloom I think it is the most ridiculously awful thing to ever grace video games. It doesn't look good and it doesn't make things look realistic. It takes light reflecting off items to a ludicrously unbelievable level. http://steamcommunity.com/id/lunatics/screenshot/595806845330531452 is without bloom on, vs http://steamcommunity.com/id/lunatics/screenshot/595806845329977037/? with it on. How is that not ugly = \.
That's really weird. I haven't had any rank reset issues for awhile now. Have you tried going to the Dallas NFO server? That one always works great for me.
I haven't played this game a couple weeks now. I was loving it so much but got fed up with the bugs especially when all of the hackers started showing up. I read the official forums and saw some of their patches they said they put out. Is the game any better now or is it still pretty fugly?