So Epic is finally releasing their Annex game mode available to all you hardcore Gears players out there; essentially a variation of Capture the Flag, it also introduces the welcome addition of respawning to the mix. Like everything else about Gears, there is a twist to respawning though: rather than arbitrarily reappearing 5 seconds after you die, the game brings dead comrades back in waves every 45 seconds or so, which is definitely an interesting catch, and is still friendly enough to make the game more fun for people that have a tendency to get head-shotted early on in matches. The patch also sees some slight weapon rebalancing, including a more powerful Lancer, which is very welcome for those of us who get sick of running around with shotguns. However, there’s been no word on the previously rumored patch that will make multiplayer achievements in the game available through both Ranked matches AND Player matches, which is what might really be enough to pull me into Gears online more often. I understand the need to keep ranking separate from matches where people can conspire to rig that system, but for achievements, it seems more than a little arbitrary to force me to play with assholes to get those achievements. Anyway for more information on the gameplay details of the new gametype and weapon balancing, 1UP has a finally-unembargoed-preview up.

Perhaps more interesting news in Gears of War territory today is the internet furor over comments made by Epic Head Tim Sweeney on last Friday’s 1UP Yours podcast, which some people interpreted to mean that Microsoft was prohibiting Epic from releasing maps that had been finished for quite some time already because of Epic’s inclination to release them without any additional charge. I can understand why this would piss people off, because I like free things too. However, the bizarre sense of entitlement people seem to have for content that was not-negligible in cost to produce does confuse me from time to time. Anyway, Mark Rein has a history of being open with the community, and in an official post on the Gears’ forums, he announced (via Joystiq) that Microsoft and Epic had made a “Bungie”:

Epic thinks the way to maximize the return on Gears of War is to give the maps away for free and Microsoft thinks the way to maximize the return on Gears of War is to sell the maps. So what we’ve agreed to do is to put these maps on sale at a reasonable price then make them free a few months later. They did this with the original Halo2 map pack and it was a huge success. Lots of people bought the maps and lots of people downloaded them when they became free. That’s what is going to happen and it seems like a fair compromise for both companies and a win-win for Gears players.

Why does Epic not have control over this even though we created this content on our own time and our own dime? Quite frankly Xbox Live Marketplace isn’t our store. It’s Microsoft’s store. Like any retailer they have the right to figure out what goes on the shelves of their store and what price they sell it at. They spend the money to operate the store and deliver the content. They’ve also spent billions of dollars to create and build Xbox and subsidize it’s the price so you can afford it and we can make games for it. As our publisher, they also invested tens of millions of dollars marketing Gears of War, and have done an awesome job for us, so they have a right to a good return on that investment.

As Tim Sweeney and I said in the podcast, we want the download economy to work – it is something the industry needs, something we hope to use in the future, something that will help bring more variety to end-users and ultimately could help bring prices down for end-users. If we had to put this map pack on a disc and sell it in retail it would be more expensive to end-users and maybe we wouldn’t have done it because of all the extra work and cost involved.

There are still sure to be a number of pissed off internet denizens, some people on this site included, but considering the realities of the vast amount of money that Microsoft invested in Gears and in the Live Marketplace, I think that this was probably the best compromise that could have been made. I don’t know if I’ll buy the new maps, but I’ll have that option, and if I decide not to, I can wait a few months. However, I do think that Microsoft is missing the good PR that would result from caving and releasing the maps for free, especially after the poor online reception of the Elite announcement and the shenanigans surrounding Live on the Windows platform.

-Aegies