Just a short while ago, Mark Rein, Vice President of Epic Games wrote a post on the official Gears of War 2 forums wishing everyone a happy new year but more importantly announced that the long awaited patch for Gears of War 2 is finally on it’s way.

The post is quite long and details quite a lot of issues that are going to be fixed, from glitches and exploits to weapon fixes. With regards to the ETA, he had the following to say:

“We don’t have an exact date for it but all indicators are it will go live within January. If that changes we’ll let you know.”

Great news then that a lot of the issues are finally being addressed. So then, what all are they going to be fixing exactly.

Rein has the following to say with regards to what will be addressed:

“We’re fixing a whole bunch of online exploits. For example we’ve fixed the ability to wield an invisible shield, melee through some walls, gain infinite Lancer ammo and equip a shield and a two-handed weapon simultaneously plus many more.

We’re also making several small changes to improve the overall online gameplay experience. A few of the ones that might interest you are; increased penalties for quitting matches early, adding additional spawn protection against planted grenades and chainsaw attacks, and adding the ability to see the Submission flag carrier destination by using Tac/Com.

We know you folks love achievements so on the achievement side we’re adding achievement progress numbers to the War Journal, increasing the frequency of in-game Achievement progression notifications and adding some new Achievements for DLC.”

That’s all well and good but I am sure that a lot of you will be interested in this next bit:

This is just a very small list of some of the things that will be in the next title update but one more item which has been talked about a lot in our forums deserves a special call out…

About that shotgun…

We fixed the client side hit detection on the shotgun so that in a high-latency (i.e. “laggy”) match, the shotgun will be more reliable. We’ve also fixed another bug whereby shotgun and boomshot rounds could strike the ground when firing from the hip.

These changes should make the Gears of War 2 gaming experience significantly better but will it be enough to pull back the disgruntled Gears of War fans that have even resorted to playing the original Gears of War again?

Rein says that they will release a more detailed list soon so we should have more information in not very long. I really hope that they add the ability to use map cycles again or at least make the whole lobby system significantly faster.

source: Epic Gears of War 2 Forums via N4G