To celebrate the new title update, Epic and Microsoft have also announced a Triple Experience Weekend on Xbox LIVE. Starting tomorrow, Thursday 27 May, at 2PM GMT, you can earn triple experience in any “Gears of War 2” multiplayer mode on Xbox LIVE. The Triple XP weekend will run until Tuesday 1 June at 2PM GMT.

All Fronts Collection, containing all 19 Gears 2 downloadable maps and the deleted single-player chapter “Road to Ruin,” is now on sale for just 800 Microsoft Points.

It’s here, They have released Title Update 6 for Gears of War 2 today. The update is available now and will download automatically when you start Gears 2 while connected to Xbox LIVE.

Title Update 6 Release Notes

Rod Fergusson, from Epic Games  revealed the list of changes to be included in the sixth title update for Gears of War 2 last week. Now Rod has said that the new patch is due to be released this wednesday. Get ready!

GearsViking: #Gears2 TU6 is landing on Wed 5 AM EDT

Rod Fergusson, from Epic Games  revealed the list of changes to be included in the sixth title update for Gears of War 2 last week. Now Rod has said that the new patch is due to be released this week. Get ready!

Via Twitter…

GearsViking: “#Gears2 TU6 lands this week.”

Tittle Update 6 is finally here… Well sorta, Rod Fergusson of Epic games posted the Title Update information. Theres going to be a lot of new stuff heading our way. The following fixes and improvements are included in Title Update 6.

Improvements
Title Update 6 makes these new improvements:

• Adds a new public multiplayer match option called Social Xbox LIVE (aka player matches), open to anyone who owns all downloadable maps (that is, All Fronts Collection). We’ll be having a promotion that will dramatically reduce the cost of the All Fronts Collection.
  

  You can join Social Matches in progress and can quit any time without penalty, although players who quit a match early don’t receive earned experience (XP) from that match.

  Social matchmaking lets your party join a match in progress. If a match is not found, your party hosts a new match, filling any empty player slots with bots.

  Social Matches automatically cycle to the next map without further matchmaking.

  Teams are rebalanced between matches based on XP level without splitting parties.

  If you quit, your spot is taken by a bot until a new player joins the match. That new player can join while the match is in progress.

  If you join a match in progress, you are assigned a team based on XP level and party size.

  If you join a match in progress, you replace a bot at the earliest opportunity: at the first bot’s death for respawning game types (for example, Annex) and at round completion for Warzone, Execution, and Wingman.

  Social leaderboards become part of the War Journal.

• Renames Public Matches to Ranked Xbox LIVE Matches to differentiate these from Social Xbox LIVE Matches, and adds some improvements to these matches.
  

  Improved host selection using bandwidth testing and previous hosting data has been added.

  Before the match begins, teams are balanced based on XP without splitting parties.

• Renames Private Matches to Custom Xbox LIVE Matches and makes these matches invite-only.
• Adds the ability to join Horde sessions that are in progress.
  

  In Social Horde, you can join a session in progress through matchmaking and you are able to continue your session from the last wave you failed without starting over.

  In Ranked Horde, you can join a session in progress only through invites.

  If you join a session in progress, at the end of the session you receive the score you achieved during the time you spent in the session.

• Improves the precision of weapon selection using the D-pad.
• Improves client-side hit detection for ballistic weapons.

Exploit Fixes
Title Update 6 fixes these possible exploits, where under certain circumstances:

• Execution rules could be ignored when using certain weapon types.
• On the Subway map, you could get outside of the playable environment by sliding into cover and rolling between a train car and the side of tracks.
• On the Blood Drive map, you could get outside of the playable environment in various locations.
• Players could grief other players on Submission, Annex, King of the Hill, and Guardian games by preventing the objective from being completed while racking up experience. Title Update 6 adds match time limits to each of these game types to prevent this practice.

General Fixes
Title Update 6 fixes these other issues as well:

• An issue that could cause your profile to be overwritten, erasing XP level, and achievement progress.
• An issue that could cause a campaign save slot to be overwritten if you previously chose to continue without saving and then signed in.

Balancing
Title Update 6 makes these balancing changes:

• Changes the Gnasher Shotgun pellet pattern to increase hit consistency.
• Changes the Guardian game type to select the leader based upon XP level (highest to lowest).

Happy April Fools Day to you all. Epic Games has decided to play a little trick on us, and changed the gameplay of Gears of War 2 for the day of April Fools! Here is what they changed for the one day of April fools.

• Insta-dbno melee
• No chainsaw interrupt
• Knockdown smokes

So let’s see what is better, elbows or chainsaws

PlatformNation reports that after almost 18 months Major League Gaming has announced that it is dropping Gears of War 2 from its professional circuit.

“Sorry about the bad news Gears players. It was good times. Best of luck to all of you.” MLG pro Killa_KC posted on twitter.

With rumors of another Gears title on the horizon, it may not be long before competitive gaming returns to the Gears universe…

 Horde

A new gameplay mode has been added to add more offline gameplay (although it can also be played online). It can also be played online with up to five players as you take on wave after wave of the locust horde. There are 50 waves of horde, each increasing in difficulty, for example, the first wave will start with very few locust to kill, around 9 which are likely to be a few wretches and drones. Although as you progress through the waves, the larger enemies appear and there are more of them, there will be many more Boomers, Grinders, Bloodmounts, Maulers, Butchers, Kantus, Flame Grenadiers and so on. This game type is incredibly difficult, even on the casual the last 10 waves are quite challenging. There is a 30 point achievement for completing all waves on any difficulty. Additional achievements are available with the extra map pack downloads, such as clearing 50 waves on any Snowblind map or clearing 10 waves on each of the maps included in each set of map downloads (Snowblind, Flashback and Combustible). One of the best tactics was to use an inward facing Boomshield to prevent enemies from kicking them down, as drones could only kick them down from the front side. However this glitch was removed or rendered useless by an update giving drones the ability to kick the shield down regardless of the side.

Meatflag/Submission

This is a variant on classic Capture-the-Flag but instead of having an inanimate object sitting in the center of a stage waiting to be captured, Gears 2 will have a mean, gun-firing, AI-controlled Stranded sitting there waiting to do battle (he’ll even tally his own score to be seen by all at the end of a round). Do enough damage to take him down to his knees and then run up, use him as a meat shield and haul his carcass back to your base to score the point for your team. Just remember, there’s nothing more humiliating than getting killed by the flag.

Wingman

Here the ten possible players (up from the original game’s eight) are broken up into sets of 2. Each pair will share the same character model, and you’ll have to hunt throughout the map to kill as much of the opposition as possible before landing at a final kill count. Like free-for-all, but with a partner to work with.

Guardian

One man on your team is the leader. If the leader is assassinated, then the ability to respawn is taken from his teammates, turning their current life into their last. The leader is called out on the opponent’s screen at all times, making the hunt that much easier. First team to wipe out the other wins. To prevent the players from tricking the other team into thinking they’re the leader, players can’t choose Hoffman or Skorge. The leaders for next round aren’t always selected by random, whoever killed the opposing team’s leader becomes their team’s leader next round, if the a team loses and no one killed the opposing teams leader then their new leader is selected by score, however, if the leader has the highest score and the opposing leader is still alive(or is killed by the other leader) the next person on the scoreboard is chosen.

Warzone

The standard Team Deathmatch mode of gears 2. Warzone is a battle between two teams for a set amount of points at the end of each match, by eliminating the opposing team each round. A point is awarded to the surviving team after the round. Players can be downed and killed from any distance with any weapon.

Execution

Similar to Warzone in that the teams compete for the most amount of points by eliminating the other team in each round. The only difference is that players can only be killed by one shot kills such as torque bow, frag grenades, boomshot, the chainsaw, shotgun or headshots, or by being downed and executed at close range, either by bullets, melee, or an execution attack.

Epic and Microsoft have teamed up to give gamers the chance to earn double experience points in Gears of War 2 this Labor Day weekend. There’s also the chance to play against Epic devs in a “Game with Developer” event taking place on Friday.

The event will run from Friday morning, Sept 4th till Tuesday morning, Sept 8th (Eastern time)

• Double experience for all Horde games and Public multiplayer games
• Winning team gets a 500 xp bonus in Public multiplayer
• Public Horde will default to Hardcore difficulty instead of Normal
•  Horde will be infected with Sires, just like the Ticker attack of July 4th
•  Hardcore Horde (Public or Private) will receive an extra experience boost (essentially double Hardcore will be the same as double Insane)
• The Game with Developer event will take place on Friday, Sept. 4th from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. (Eastern Time). Look for the following Gamertags and send off an invite:

  EpicDarkCorner1
  EpicDarkCorner2
  EpicDarkCorner3
  EpicDarkCorner4
  EpicDarkCorner5
  EpicDarkCorner6
  EpicDarkCorner7
  EpicDarkCorner8
  EpicDarkCorner9
  EpicDarkCorner0