GamePro’s Sid Shuman sat down with Cliff Bleszinski in a recent interview and they rapped about everything Gears and while it’s an interesting read I enjoyed Bleszinski’s answer about why there’s no beta or demo for GoW2. Be sure to check out the rest of the interview when you have a few minutes of downtime.
A beta is like hooking up with a girl just to say, “yeah, I f*cked her.” I know that sounds crude, but it’s the honest-to-God truth. Once you play a beta, you can check it off your list — you can say, “yeah, I played it.” Then you might not feel motivated to get that initial cherry popping from the proper, final game.
Honestly, we could make a demo, but Gears of War 2 wouldn’t be out until February of 2009 [if we did]. That stuff takes times to put together.
Granted, we may need to tweak a few things in multiplayer after release through an update. People are going to find exploits we didn’t anticipate. That’s the reality of making a game — look at MMOs. We’re prepared for that, but we think we’re shipping a pretty great game out of the box here.