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Earlier this month we brought you news about the Gears of War 3 beta. If Xbox 360 owners buy the Epic Edition of Bulletstorm, you can can get early access to the Gears 3 multiplayer beta. Co-founder and president of Epic Games, Mike Capp, recently talked to Gamespot about the tie-in. He said the beta would be released "sometime around April or so." Attentive gamers may note that April was the planned release date for Gears 3 before it got pushed backed. to autumn 2011. Looks like Microsoft and Epic want some of that gargantuan holiday sales money games like Halo: Reach and Call of Duty: Black Ops earned this year.
A recent Game Informer article had a hands-on preview of the game, and the actual title of the article said the game "already feels complete." Just how developed will this beta be? Only time will tell. If Gears 3 is basically a finished game, the next nine months should allow Epic ample time to polish and perfect the game.
The developers don't need a beta to tell them that brighter maps are more popular on the multiplayer front. According to Xbox 360 The Official Xbox Magazine, a game map's popularity is almost directly related to how bright it is.
You can almost rank how much [maps are] played by how bright they are. The darker, dreary, more depressing maps tend to be on the bottom...we have a whole new lighting model and a lot of our maps are brighter, so we try to take that into account. Even the maps that are 'dark', they're movie dark. It just means they're more blue than dark.
-Lee Perry, Senior Gameplay Designer for Gears of War 3
So in addition to the muted browns and grays that have been so prevalent in the Gears series, we can now expect muted blue as well. Hopefully they have time to add some more colors to the game, instead of a 1000 shades of apocalypse.
This wouldn't be a proper Gears of War update without a quote from Epic frontman, Cliff Blezinski. Last week he tweeted:
Look for special unlocks in Gears 3 for those of you who have played other Epic games such as Shadow Complex, UT3, Gears, and Bulletstorm.
We don't know what these unlocks are yet, but we'll be watching out for any details. Gears of War 3 is still a ways off, but it's looking like it will be one of the premiere co-op releases of 2011. Stay tuned to Co-Optimus.com for more details.
Source: Trueachievements.com