Gears of War 4 Multiplayer Beta Coming April 18th

Microsoft and The Coalition have announced the start date of the Gears of War 4 open beta.

Fans who played Gears of War: Ultimate Edition on either the Xbox One or on Windows 10 will be invited into the beta in waves starting on April 18th. On April 24th, the beta will be open to all Xbox Live Gold members. The beta will then end on May 1st.

In addition, Microsoft has announced that the cutoff date to enter the beta early has been extended. Players will now have until April 11th to play Gears of War: Ultimate Edition in order to be guaranteed a spot into the early beta. There’s still plenty of time left to play if you haven’t already.

The multiplayer for Gears of War 4 is being co-developed by Splash Damage. Splash Damage is known for games like Brink and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

According to The Coalition’s studio head Rod Fergusson, Splash Damage’s previous work on Gears of War: Ultimate Edition makes the Brink developer a good fit to help develop the multiplayer mode for Gears of War 4.

“[Splash Damage is] helping with a lot of the level design stuff,” Fergusson told Game Informer. “Especially with the meshing of multiplayer maps, we’re tapping into the expertise they got from Gears of War: Ultimate Edition. They also have a lot of expertise with online systems, in terms of matchmaking from Ultimate Edition. They basically had to rewrite for Xbox One, between us and them, the whole matchmaking sub-system. … When you get a strategic partner like Splash Damage, we talk about training up our own team on Gears, but when you have another team that’s trained up on Gears, we definitely want to work with them as much as possible.”

Gears of War 4 is set to launch later this year for the Xbox One.