We all thought we were going to get our hands on Gears of War 3 in April of 2011.  Now it looks like we instead will have our hands only on the beta by April, with the full game being pushed off to the holiday season.

The reasoning behind this is two-fold.  Firstly, spring is already jam packed with big games that Gears 3 would overwhelm.  Secondly, Microsoft is a bit thin on exclusive holiday season releases this year, so pushing Gears 3 to that slot gives them that big triple-A holiday sales pushing game.

The extra five months of dev time on the game should help in some respects, though Gears 1′s multiplayer brilliance actually came from Epic rushing the MP out the door and not having a chance to screw it up with the slow, “tactical” gameplay that Epic desired.