Were you one of many who was initially delighted about the new Gears of War patch, only to discover that they had tweaked the Roadie Run in such a way that it became even more irritating? It seems Epic have listened, and another update is in the works, which will strike a fair balance between old and new.

Rod Fergusson, the producer of Gears, had this to say:

As you know, at Epic we try very hard to listen to our community and address issues they may be having with our games. Recently, to do just that, we tweaked the way that roadie run controls so that players would have greater control of their movement in an attempt to reduce the amount of times a player would accidently get sucked into cover. Our idea was to look at “player intent”, in essence, where is the movement stick when a player bumps into cover. If the player wants to go into cover then they’ll have the stick pointing towards it. It they want to stay out of cover then they’ll have the control stick pointing away from it.

We tested this method extensively for weeks and really felt that it was a solid improvement, otherwise we would have never released it. We have received numerous emails and forum posts from people who really like the new system but unfortunately that is not true for everyone. Based on what we’re hearing from the community now, there are a large number of players where this new control system does not help them as we intended. For that we apologize.

The good news is that we have been looking at this problem very intently as soon as we started getting reports of people getting caught by cover more frequently and we believe we have found the ideal solution for both groups of players. It’s one that takes the best elements of the original roadie run control scheme and marries it with the best elements of the latest roadie run update and doesn’t have any of the negative issues of either.

Our current plan is to continue to test this latest tweak to make sure that there are no more issues with it moving forward and then to include it in our next title update. This will not happen immediately of course as a full test pass and a full certification test pass takes time, and we’ll want to monitor if there are any new issues that require attention due to the inclusion of Annex or the removal of certain exploits.

We appreciate your patience in this matter and please know that we have your best interest at heart any time we look at updating the game.

“Bah, not again…”

People actually complimented the new system? Really? It’s nice to know that Epic do at least listen and that we can all make a difference. Personally I had no problems with the original. Sure, you occasionally get stuck on an object, but it was at least bearable. Apparently it needed a change, but we now need a Version 3. Perhaps the easiest solution would be to have options of which version you wish to use. That would please everyone.