system
A chat on subreddit /r/pcmasterrace
human
Or they just ran out of optimization budget and had marketing put a spin on it.
gpt
Crysis was using graphical effects in 2007 that wouldn't become the norm until the next whole generation of consoles. It was still going toe to toe graphically with games coming out almost a whole decade later. That and the game came out at a time when devs thought the future of CPUs was progressively higher clock speeds on single cores, not the huge multicores we have today, which is why it still runs pretty bad on modern hardware.

You can't honestly look at that game compared to other 2007 games and really say "muh unoptimized" when it literally looks a whole generation ahead.