Epic Games and co-developer People Can Fly may be keeping relatively quiet on Gears of War: Judgment for the moment, but that doesn’t mean they’re not willing to go ahead and share the game’s release date with us.

During a panel Comic Con 2012, Epic announced that Gears of War: Judgment will be releasing exclusively on Xbox 360 on March 19, 2013. Unfortunately we didn’t get a trailer to go along with the announcement, so that footage from back at E3 will have to do for now.

Gears of War: Judgment is a prequel to the original three Gears of War games, which follows Baird and Cole and takes place a couple of months after ‘Emergence Day’, when the Locust first unleashed their army on the population of Sera.

In an interview with Joystiq last month, Epic’s Cliff Bleszinski explained that, while a game set after Emergence Day wasn’t exactly what fans may have expected from a prequel, it was the timeline that made the most sense for a Gears of War game.

“The time came, we finished Gears 3 and obviously it’s done well for us, and a prequel seemed like the next logical step,” Bleszinski said. “So we started looking at the timeframes and what we could do. I looked at E-Day and was like, ‘Yeah, there’s no chainsaw on E-Day.’ It took the COG a little bit to figure out that the Locust have thick skin and their bayonets are breaking, things like that.”

The Pendulum Wars, which was mentioned several times throughout the Gears of War trilogy, was another point that fans expected Epic to look to for a prequel. However, Bleszinski notes that the Pendulum Wars was a human-on-human conflict, which would be a pretty big departure from what fans are used to seeing in the Gears of War franchise.

“Now you have no chainsaw and now you have no monsters. And now we’re not Gears of War anymore. So we looked at the timeframe, looked at the timeline, and figured that there’s a window there of several months after Emergence Day, where humanity got hit and quickly got their sh** back together and figured out, hey, put a chainsaw on the end of the gun – that’ll help. So that’s the timeframe for the game.”

Are you looking forward to Gears of War: Judgment?

Gears of War: Judgment Arrives on Xbox 360 in March is a post from: The Inquisitr