Hmm, yeah except that what Bethesda does is very different to Crysis or any similar game.
I am really NOT a pro on that stuff, just the bits and pieces I have read here and there. But as far as I know, Beth usually runs their game on cells, cells that you can visit again, towns, houses, areas etc.
And even if you step out of one cell, there is still stuff happening in the others you visited. NPC routes, items thrown around etc. The Cells do reset once in a while, but I takes a certain amount of time, I think like 30 in game days in Skyrim, but I am not sure. It means when you drop an item in a barrel or somewhere in the town, the item will dissapar after some time. I don't think Crysis or most other shooters developed their engine to keep track of 2000 NPCs and literaly thousands of objects that can be manipulated by the player. This really requires a lot of processing power, because after some time it adds up. Save game bload, crashes, memory issues and all sorts of weird issues are (sadly ...) rather common with Beth games after a while.
What ever if that helps the game to feel more alive now or not is a whole different question. I am just saying, a lot of the processing power goes in many different directions where I would say that Crysis has to spend a lot less of it's power to the AI and NPCs for the simple fact that it doesn't have to care about areas that the player will never visit again, as it is a very linear game, it has to use it's whole processing power to rendering one and only one area, which takes a lot less effort even if it is a relatively large area. Crysis also contains much less items and objects for the player to manipulate. And that makes the engine work in a different way. It is a big difference if you have one cell with lots of characters that the engine has to render only once, with it's textures, lightning etc, or if there are several cells that the engine has to keep track off, if NPCs move from one cell to the other.
A game like no clue Fallout 3 or Skyrim for that matter allows the player to pretty much visit any place at any time. That means the more stuff you do in the game, the more stress it can mean for the engine. Potentially thousands of changed objects and NPC routes. Just placing more NPCs in a game like Skyrim for example can really mess up the engine and cause the game to crash. Most engines are simply not there yet, but they might as well be one day! Who knows.
I am not saying Bethsesdas approach is the best one, hell I would even say their approach is as far as RPGs goes not really that great making their games rather hiking and cave simulators where I feel the interaction with NPCs should be more important than throwing forks and garden gnomes around. But for some reason there are thousands of people that love Bethesda games for exactly that reason because you can role play a character with compulsive hoarding disorder.
I am just saying that both Crysis and the games made by Beth are aiming for very different design goals.
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