Gears of War 3 Gets Public Beta and Dedicated Servers

Somehow developers keep forgetting to invite us to their press conferences (our invite probably got lost in the mail), so we don’t get to see awesome things like Gears of War 3’s multiplayer hands on. Now that I have the self-deprecation out of the way, I can tell you that EPIC Games recently invited a bunch of journalist types to their offices in North Carolina to check out the latest offering in the chainsaw-and-cover franchise.

While we reported last week that Gears 3 was being delayed until the Fall of 2011 because of a marketing decision, it turns out this speculation was a little off the mark. In a total surprise move, EPIC Games will be hosting a public Beta for Gears 3 early in 2011. As we may remember from Gears of War 2, the multiplayer was a bit of a mess. It usually took about fifteen minutes on average to find a game, and then, if you didn’t get host, you might have well just quit. EPIC hopes to address this issue by having dedicated servers this time around to get rid of the hosting problem and a Beta to iron out the bugs. IGN has a video preview of all the changes coming at us in the Beta and Fall 2011, when the game finally hits:

Source – IGN