Many people who've pre-ordered the extremely hyped and much-anticipated Gears of War 3 were content with just receiving the beta (as a reward for assuring Epic Games that they'll be purchasing their game), but it seems that gamers will be getting a little bit more than the recently expired beta. The new pre-order bonuses are exclusive multiplayer characters that can only be downloaded depending on where the game is pre-ordered.

The usual retailers that offer goodies for pre-orderers will be be offering these new bonuses: none other than GameStop, Best Buy, Amazon, and Walmart.

The real kicker is that each bonus is exclusive to that store and can't be obtained anywhere else, so we can imagine the inner angst this will create amongst gamers when trying to decide which retailer to commit their purchase to.

What's really odd about all of the retailer exclusive bonuses is that Epic Games hasn't even officially announced them yet. Even weirder yet, the bonuses aren't even a major selling point made by each retailer, and each pre-order bonus for Gears of War 3 is only casually mentioned when the game is clicked on — Amazon's has even been remvoed for the time being.

Here's the list of all the exclusive Gears of War 3 characters you can choose from.

  • GameStop = Commando Dom
  • Best Buy = Mechanic Baird
  • Amazon = Savage Kantus
  • Walmart = Savage Grenadier Elite

There's the list, but if actual pictures of them are really what you want then we've got you covered. A couple of the pictures are of less-than-ideal quality, but regardless they can be seen in the gallery below:

[gallery exclude="86225" columns="2" orderby="ID"]

It was obvious that pre-ordering Gears of War 3 would net buyers something else after the official beta ended to keep the sales rolling in, and the fact that character skins are the bonus makes a lot of sense. A lot of hardcore Gears of War fans are going to be a little miffed about the fact that there's no way they'll be able to obtain access to all of the skins without buying the game four separate times, but hopefully Epic Games will include all of the pre-order bonuses as part of their recently announced Epic Edition — following the move by LittleBigPlanet 2's Collector Edition.

There has been a lot of Gears of War 3 news flying around for the past few weeks, and the fact that the game industry is only two weeks away from E3 means that nobody should expect the Gears news to stop pouring anytime soon.

Where will you be pre-ordering your copy of Gears of War 3 from?

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Source: GameStop, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Best Buy