Epic's Rein "not in a huge hurry" for next-gen consoles

Epic boss Mark Rein has said the company isn't in a "huge hurry" for the next hardware cycle from Sony and Microsoft.

"I'd like to see it at a time when consumers are going to be ready to adopt it and jump in whole-heartedly," Rein told Eurogamer in a wide-ranging piece on the next-gen.

"I'm not in a huge hurry for it. I'd rather wait until they can bring out hardware that can do Samaritan affordably than bring out something super high-priced and the market adopts it slowly as they wait for a price drop. Either way I'm confident we'll have great a great game engine for it thanks to the efforts we've already got underway like Samaritan," he added, referring to the tech demo Epic showed at GDC in March.

Crytek UK has also said that the next-gen consoles from Sony and Microsoft will have graphics similar to those seen with DX11.

"It's going to depend a lot on when Sony and Microsoft decide is the right moment to announce and launch things, but it does feel at the moment that the hardware we get in next generation consoles will be about the sort of level that DX11 is at - that's where it currently looks like it's going." said principal programmer Pete Hall.

Crytek lead programmer Mark Tully added: "The DX11 support for Crysis 2 was planned quite early on, but while it was being implemented, we were discovering things about the production methods we'd use. If we'd done it slightly differently, we could have achieved even higher results. Those learnings will be going into future Crytek projects. The authoring processes will be able to still target the consoles, but be able to produce even higher results on DX11 than what we were able to achieve with Crysis 2."

Speculation on the next cycle of hardware has ramped up following Nintendo's unveiling of Wii U at E3 in June. It's due to launch next year.