Videogamer
If you're anticipating the upcoming Gears of War 3 multiplayer beta then you're probably also wondering how long it's going to take to get your hands on the shiny Gold-Plated Retro Lancer. Executive producer Rod Fergusson reckons an average player will be looking at "about a thousand minutes", or 16 hours. Speaking to VideoGamer.com, Fergusson had a go at tackling the numbers. "It takes about ten minutes per match... so it's about a thousand minutes. I'm jet-lagged, so I'm not going to try and attempt the math at this particular moment." The Gold-plated Retro Lancer unlocks after completing 90 matches during the beta, with the weapon becoming accessible in the final game to anyone who then goes on to score 100 kills with it. Players of the beta will also be able to unlock a costume for Cole and flaming variants of the Hammerburst, Lancer, Sawed-off Shotgun and Gnasher by sinking time into the game. When asked if this was done purposely to get people playing, Fergusson explained that "the thing for [Epic] is the beta is about getting information from the customer. We want to have a bunch of telemetry data to say what's working, what's not working, what are trends, what's the matchmaking like. To do that we need to have people playing all the time, so we wanted to put these little carrots out there for people to stick with it and play over the entire period so we can get that data." http://www.videogamer.com:/news/gow3_gold-plated_retro_lancer_takes_16_hours_to_unlock.html
