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.
April 5th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
i wish they had 4 player co-op on Xbox Live with this game.
April 5th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
Oh that would be sweet. But if they decide to create a gametype like Assault which is missioned based just like a campaign then we can enjoy co-op defending against an intruder or completing missions (whichever side you choose)
Deacon, have you ever played the original UT on PC before? If you have’nt then you don’t knw what you missed. That was (still is to me) the best damn FSP to come out with multiple gamestyle games. If you ever have the chance do some research on it and you will see what I am talking about.
April 5th, 2007 at 1:33 pm
i’ve never been a big UT fan. i’ve heard the stories though…i might have to dig for it…i’m sure it’s free somewhere nowadays right?
April 5th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Well, I don’t knwo if it’s free or not. But research about how Epic dominated the FPS genre will give you a good understanding why they are doing so well with GoW. When they made the announcement back in May 2005 at the E3 that they were going to make an FPS exclusive for 360, I knew then that that was THE killer app, I knew it right off the bat. Epic puts great effort into creativity and uniqueness, and yes Cliffy B was the lead designer of UT back then. Man the more I talk about that game the more I miss it and how I used to download new maps almost every other day because of the mod tool that was given to users to make their own maps. It was such a thrill to play. Honestly, that game would be just as much fin to play today as it was back then, it was that good. Only an upgrade to the graphics would be required. The gameplay was solid.
April 5th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Deac - I haven’t seen a new date set yet, but Microsoft apparently put the kabosh on the previous date of April 9th.
As of now, I don’t believe there’s a new date set.
April 5th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
yeah i caught that. my guess is it still hits on that week.
April 5th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Should be worth the wait though.
April 5th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
GoW is by no means a “killer app”. This will be evident once Halo3 hits and nobody will be playing it. GoW will go down as a gap-filler and an golden opportunity squandered with exceedingly limited Live play.
April 5th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
[quote comment="26973"]GoW is by no means a “killer app”. This will be evident once Halo3 hits and nobody will be playing it. GoW will go down as a gap-filler and an golden opportunity squandered with exceedingly limited Live play.[/quote]
Whether or not Gears is a “killer app” shouldn’t even be an argument at this point. Three million copies sold is a number that not many games hit - let alone within two and a half months…
As far as the Halo comment, I think that Gears has and will continue to be a nice addition to Xbox Live. There will always be people that prefer third-person shooters to first-person and vice versa, but Halo will inevitably grab a large portion of Xbox Live game time - regardless of the genre, so Gears won’t be the only game affected by this.
April 6th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
3 million games sold is nothing. It won’t even earn a spot in the top 50 at that rate. Let’s try to keep it in perspective.
GoW could have been a sustained hit but gross limitations on Live play-styles prevented that.