A couple of days ago, Epic's Mark Rein wrote on the official Gears of War forums that new achievements for Annex and Hidden Fronts (the downloadable map pack) were in order. Rein said that some of them were strongly connected to things relating to playing the maps in the Hidden Fronts map pack. There are some good news for Gears fans today.

Rein's original post: "We're also going to have new achievements relating to Annex and the Hidden Fronts downloadable content." [...] "Some of the achievements are tied to things relating to playing the maps in the Hidden Fronts map pack which currently costs money but will be made free in a few months."

Apparently the "Roadie Run" issue, which Gears of War gamers should be quite familiar with, is going to be solved (players getting sucked into a cover position against their will). Epic's Rod Fergusson clarifies:

"If the player wants to go into cover then they'll have the stick pointing towards it," Fergusson wrote on the official Gears of War forums. "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.

Yes, I know, I said there were going to be some good news. Well, here they are, straight from the man's mouth: "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," said Fergusson.

Well, I guess that's over and done with. Let's hope it actually works. The full report is up on the official Gears of War forums.