A poster said consoles use old technologies which is untrue,and the links you provided both say the same month of general release which shows consoles are not using old technology.Having said that I should have said similar technology(not more advanced) as they are both related.
You might also notice I didn't mention speed - I mentioned the level of technology and the PS4 specs and technology were known 7~9 months before the R9 290 launch:
https://techreport.com/news/24725/ps4-architect-discusses-consoles-custom-amd-processor/
https://www.anandtech.com/show/6770/sony-announces-playstation-4-pc-hardware-inside
https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/...avily-modified-radeon-supercharged-apu-design
Sony was talking about ASync compute in early 2013. AMD only started talking about in 2015:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/9124/amd-dives-deep-on-asynchronous-shading
Consoles have limitations in die area,so you are correct PC GPUs at the top end will be faster. However,no GCN GPU in early 2013 could do what the PS4 GPU could do.Public demos of the hardware followed between April to June 2013. That makes the PS4 GPU the first demonstrated GCN GPU to move past the original GCN1.0 design in the HD7970,and the most advanced technology AMD GPU publically demonstrated at that time. This is before the R9 290(also 8 ACE).
The HD7970/HD7950/HD7870/HD7850 had two ACEs - the PS4 was an 8 ACE design with enhanced compute capabilities.An 8 ACE mainstream GCN GPU part did appear - it was AMD Tonga(R9 285) in 2014.
Every rumour hinted by then developer units were shipping with the actual SOCs by early 2013. If the final dev kits were not available 6~12 months before launch there would be no launch titles - remember the PS3 was not X86 and games had to redeveloped from PowerPC.
The R9 290 launch was relatively low volume and seemed rushed(GTX780/GTX780TI launches?). AMD slapped on a quick fix cooler,and it took months for AIB models to appear in volume.
Also there have been persistent rumours because AMD was so short of money,Sony/MS helped stump up the funds for GPU R and D. As far back as 2012/2013 AMD had started to pair down GPU R and D in favour of CPUs like Zen(why AMD had no answer to Maxwell). Even AMD touted area and power efficiency as one of the advantages of the RDNA2 RT implementation,which sounds very good for consoles.
The gameplay was mostly fine IMHO. The nanosuit for the most part allowed you to tailor the way you played and was made with keyboard and mouse in mind. The semi-openworld maps allowed you to approach targets in different ways and via different gameplay styles. The environments were destructable,so you could use that during gameplay. Vehicles had different destruction points which could be used. Even unlike many games,Crysis used different AI models. During the frost stages,there was both walking and flying enemies. Most games have walking bipedal enemies as they re-use human NPC AI models.
The part inside the alien ship looked amazing but again people moaned about that,just because they needed to use a different set of mechanics during gameplay. Even in the frost stages people were complaining about having to fight flying enemies. IMHO most of the moaning was because people didn't want to spend £200~£300 on a 8800GT/8800GTS and overclock their £100 CPU to play the game. Hence,they had a poor gameplay experience because of the low framerates IMHO.The only part which was uniformly poor was the flying part - but even Crytek agreed and removed it in the recent remastered version.
The issue is that the it gave you a choice,but too many wanted to be handheld and pushed down a narrow tunnel,so moaned as the game could be challenging if you didn't use tactics. You can see that with Crysis:Warhead which had far less complaining,as they downgraded some aspects of the graphics to make it run better,and made it more linear.
When Crytek then tried to make a more conventional hand-holding PC game in Crysis2 which ran much better,had a "better" story,a better soundtrack,PC gamers then moaned the graphics were not good enough. So what did they want great graphics which needed a decent PC,or worse graphics which ran better?? PC gamers at times just contradict themselves.
IMHO,I think AAA devs seeing what happened with Crytek pandering to the PC crowd,and still failing miserably just put off big devs from really pushing technically challenging games to PC. They were right - look how much Fortnite has made.
I really didn't understand the complaining about the story either. It was an FPS game,and Crytek sold it as such. FarCry didn't have a great story too(but people didn't seem to care as much),and games such as Quake,Doom,etc were hardly known for their storylines or memorable characters. But Crytek tried to make a more coherent story with Crysis 2 and Crysis 3 and still people didn't care.
