Good things come to those who wait.  The old proverb rings true here, as the delay of the Gears of
War 3 release to holiday 2011 will allow Epic the time needed to run a multiplayer beta, and they’ll do it with dedicated servers to boot.

With this announcement, Epic is addressing two of the biggest issues that players have had with the Gears of War franchise since the beginning.  Both of these were especially apparent in Gears of War 2, where players often joked that they had paid $60 for a beta version of the game due to the number of bugs and glitches that came with it.  Host advantage was also worse than ever, and has been probably the biggest complaint about the Gears of War series from the get-go.

If Epic can squash out the multiplayer bugs and inbalances during the game’s beta, rather than after release, and also get rid of host advantage entirely, then that will go a long way into legitimizing the Gears of War multiplayer in many of the hater’s eyes.