Epic Games announced over the past weekend that the “Epic Edition” of Bulletstorm ships with a Gears of War 3 beta token. In a recent interview with Gamespot, Epic’s prez Mike Capps said that the beta should be dropping “sometime around April”, or basically when Gears of War 3 was originally scheduled to come out. It’s like a consolation prize or something.
“My guess is it will be sometime around April or so. It’s going to be early enough so it really impacts Gears [of War 3’s] development, but we want to make sure everyone has the chance to play Bulletstorm before they jump right into the beta,” he said. “The thing I liked about April is that’s when Gears fans expected to play Gears 3. This way, they can still do that. Microsoft approached us about moving the game back to September.”
It’s also the first time a Gears of War title will be heading into a public beta. “ I think everybody knows we had some multiplayer stability issues with Gears 2 multiplayer out of the box,” Capps added. “While we fixed those later, the opportunity to be really, really sure that our new dedicated server infrastructure is going to be operational on day one with Gears 3 was totally worth the time to make the beta.”
Bulletstorm hits the street on 25 February 2011, while Gears of War 3 is tentatively slotted in for a September launch.