Gears of War 2 recently received its fifth (!) title update, bringing with it a number of improvements, exploit fixes and general fixes to further smoothen out any issues you currently have with the game. You can read through a list of those fixes a little further below.

Additionally, Epic announced that they’ll be hosting another double XP event weekend, beginning on the morning of October 30th (this Friday), giving you the chance to earn double the normal amount of experience points in competitive multiplayer and Horde modes.

Epic hasn’t forgotten about Halloween, either, and will be making changes to Horde mode to make it “appropriately ‘scary’ for Halloween.” Their plans sound insane. From the post:

“Beyond that though we wanted to mess with the waves in Horde to try and make it appropriately “scary” for Halloween. So while Butchers seemed on target for the theme, they didn’t provide enough umph to make it scary.

“So we thought, what if any of the many Boomers could attack on any wave and when possible, a full Boomer squad consisting of Grinders, Butchers, Flame Boomers and regular Boomshot Boomers could appear and attack all at once. And of course waves 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 would be nothing but wave after wave of Boomers. Sounds scary and fun to me!”

“For those of you scoring from home,” continued the post, “you may notice that I didn’t mention the Maulers (aka the Boomers with exploding flail and shield). That’s because for this event we’re pulling them out. We figured what is the fun of having a massive Boomer onslaught when you can just plant a shield to block them off. So unless the shield is part of the map, you’re on your own!”

That’s pretty intense, so good luck to anyone playing this weekend! You’ll need it!

The full list of fixes and improvements brought to Gears of War 2 with Title Update 5 follows below:

Improvements

• Adds the ability to view friendly-planted grenades in Tac/Com.
• Removes the cringe caused when a smoke grenade forces a player to drop a meatshield.
• Adds bonus points to the winning leader’s score in the Guardian game mode if the leader successfully survives the winning round.
• Changes the postmatch Invite button to only invite former teammates, so a player can create parties more easily instead of trying to create a Private Match that includes both teams from the former match.
• Returns the roadie-run camera movements to the way they were in Gears of War 1 by decreasing the dampening values.

Exploit Fixes

• A player could modify the game’s behavior due to a security vulnerability introduced in an earlier title update.
• A player could use a turbo controller to artificially maximize their rate of fire.
• A player could mantle a planted shield in competitive multiplayer to hide inside geometry or to travel outside of the map. The ability to mantle shields was removed in competitive multiplayer but remains in Horde and Campaign.
• Title Update 5 also fixes a number of other, lesser-known exploits.

General Fixes

• An issue that contributed to the “sticky walk” problem, where a player’s avatar could stutter after the player picks up a weapon.
• An issue that could prevent players from hearing the “boom” telegraph from Boomers.
• An issue that could cause looping audio to continue playing after the player who triggered that sound is killed.
• An issue that could cause multiple names to be highlighted yellow on the scoreboard instead of the name of the player viewing the scoreboard.
• An issue that prevented the game from granting the earned experience points from the fiftieth wave of Horde.
• An issue that caused players at level 100 to see the “congratulations” message after every match.