Gears of War continues to tear through many of our nights over Xbox Live.  We’ve played just about every way imagineable it seems or at least we thought.  Soon there will be a new way to play Gears of War.  Epic plans to release a new game type called Annex on April 9 hopefully in time for the next Unscripted Nights!  Here are a few details about Annex.

Objective: Capture and hold key locations to collect enough points to win the round.

Description:  In Annex, you win by keeping control over key map locations, or objectives, long enough to collect a winning number of points. Every map has two to five identified objectives available for capture, with one objective active at a time. Objectives are based on map weapon-spawn locations and have a potential value of 60 points toward either team’s score.

Teams collect those points by maintaining ownership of an objective until all its 60 points have been distributed. Every second that a team controls an objective, the team gets one point. When an objective falls to zero points, the next objective is selected at random.

On the HUD, the current objective appears below the team scores at top left. This indicator contains several pieces of relevant information.  The weapon icon inside the circle indicates which weapon-spawn location is being used as the objective.  The compass along the outer edge of the circle shows the relative direction to the objective.  The number inside the circle indicates how many points remain at that objective and the background icon color indicates which team currently controls it.

Respawns:  Infinite, wave-based every 15 seconds.

You can find more details of the new game type at the official site for Gears of War.