Shift up a Gear

US, January 6, 2009 - Epic Games is kicking off the new year with a hefty patch for Gears of War 2, one that promises to address ongoing multiplayer bugs, fix persistent glitches, improve the netcode and even add a few achievements for good measure.

In a post on the official Gears of War message boards today, Epic Vice President Mark Rein announced that the title update will be released sometime in January, although no specific date has been nailed down just yet. Rein's post is a laundry list of some of the most glaring problems with Gears 2's multiplayer, including the ability to:


Wield an invisible shield
Wield a shield along with a two-handed weapon
Melee opponents through walls
Gain infinite Lancer machine gun ammunition
And "many more"


In addition to these bug fixes, Epic plans to increase penalties for players who quit matches early, add additional spawn protection against planted grenades and chainsaw attacks and include the ability to see the flag carrier position in the Submission mode. Rein also said Epic has fixed the client-side hit detection issues with the Gnasher shotgun, which should improve the weapon's performance in laggy online matches. Along those same lines, a particularly troublesome bug in which non-host Boomshot and shotgun rounds strike the ground (instead of your intended target) when firing from the hip.

There are no specifics on the new achievements yet, but we do know they'll be related to downloadable content. The patch will also increase the frequency of achievement progress notification and add that information to the in-game War Journal.

Rein's forum post hits the high points, but a full list of the update's features hasn't been released yet. And Epic isn't stopping there.

"Once it's done we'll start working on the next update," Rein wrote. "We'll try to do a better job keeping you informed of our progress on future updates and we'll try to be a little more active in the forums once this update is released."

thanks to ign.com for the info