Executive producer 'shocked by limitations'.

FUEL screenshot

PS3-exclusive racer MotorStorm: Pacific Rift was a "comedown" and its limitations "shocking", the executive producer of upcoming open-world racer FUEL has bravely claimed.

Speaking to VideoGamer.com in an interview published elsewhere on the site, Codemasters executive producer David Brickley said: "Many people remember the FMV (which you can see for yourself here) more than anything and what that seemed to promise. When you sat down and played it, it's a great circuit racer but it was a mirage."

Comparing the title to FUEL, which will provide a mammoth 5,000 square mile map for drivers to explore, Brickley said: "When these guys (Asobo Studio) developed the technology in certain ways [you thought], "this is real, man". You look at something like MotorStorm and then get the lessons from it, but really it's a whole other offering to say that CG movie is never a reality, or that freedom or that drama or that spectacle. Those are great lessons but we didn't have to be constrained by having to have a turbo system. You try going ten feet off the racing line in MotorStrom and you're back where you were."

This isn't the first time Brickely's talked up his game. Back in September he told VideoGamer.com that FUEL's game world would fill about four Blu-ray discs if it was developed using traditional methods and that Paradise City, from Criterion's Burnout Paradise, only amounts to a "postage stamp" when placed on top of FUEL's open world.

When asked if he was disappointed by MotorStorm: Pacific Rift, Brickley replied: "I think everybody must have thought that first video was so shocking and so spectacular. I confess when I imported it from Japan and then sat down and played it I was shocked by the limitations. Not to say it wasn't a great game because it was, but that video, along with the Killzone one, set out to get attention. By God it did that. I think anything after that was going to be a bit of a comedown. To be perfectly honest when these guys come up with an engine that says we can render by an order of a magnitude bigger than anything that's gone before, then it's like, OK, we're going to have to approach this in a completely different way."

We thought MotorStorm: Pacific Rift was great, and gave it 8/10 in our review from October last year. Check out our latest preview of FUEL right here, as well as the interview in full here.

What do you think about Brickely's feelings on MotorStorm: Pacific Rift? Let us know in the comments section below.