"Adrian Smith not convinced by power of PS3 & Xbox 360

A leading developer has expressed doubts as to whether coders will really be able to create anything on a par with much of the next-gen footage that has so far been released.

Adrian Smith, co-founder and operations director of Circle Studio, told gamesradar.com, "We've seen games with 500 people of a PlayStation 2-type quality or we've seen one character which looks movie-esque."

But Smith - who also co-founded Core, the studio originally responsible for the Tomb Raider series - warns that such images may not be representative of what is actually possible.

"I don't know at this moment in time that either the PS3 or Xbox 360 has the ultimate power to do such massive, high quality main characters in environments with lots of things happening."

As a veteran developer with 15 years industry experience, Smith has an understandably pragmatic reaction to early demos purportedly showing off the technical capabilities of new hardware.

"How long is it going to take the development community to actually find out what they're capable of? The original PlayStation 2 movies were spectacular and I'm not so sure that developers have even got there yet."" [more]