2006’s Gears of War was the first real mainstream hit for Microsoft’s Xbox 360. It was so successful that Gears of War 2 hit just 2 years later, and we’re all now currently waiting on the 3rd installment of the adventures of Marcus Fenix and co. You couldn’t be blamed for thinking that with the 2 year gap between the first 2 games, we’d be seeing Gears 3 around Christmas 2010. Maybe not.

Michael Capps, President of Epic games was caught at TGS saying, “If there were a next Gears of War, that will be for the next console generation, whenever that is.” Before you go running off proclaiming that Xbox 720 is going to be released in 2012, Capps later explained that what he meant was the next Gears will probably be released in around 4-5 years time, and that it would be for the current generation of systems.

So it looks like we’re going to have to wait it out a lot longer for more stop n’ pop action, but this cloud of course does have a silver lining. If the 3rd game does make its way onto the next-generation of consoles, then it will be built on Unreal Engine 4, the successor to the very successful Unreal Engine 3, which aside from Epic’s shooter series has played host to other great games like Unreal Tournament 3, another Epic franchise, and most recently Batman: Arkham Asylum.

So next time we do see Marcus, he might well be so life like you mistake him for a mirror, that is if you’ve been hitting the gym all day everyday.