Players will be automatically prompted to download the patch upon booting the game while signed into Xbox Live, and will need to apply the update in order to play online.

"In order to get the update out as quickly as possible, we focused just on immediate infrastructure issues and have left any potential gameplay issues for a future update," senior producer Rod Fergusson wrote on the game's official forum.

The patch details, as relayed by Fergusson, follow:

• Adjustments to make Public matchmaking faster, especially in the single player party and the four player party case. Some of these adjustments should be felt immediately and some will play out over several days as our update enables us to reduce player segmentation by reducing the number of servers required to do matchmaking. This will increase the number of possible matches available for you to join.
• A tweak that should prevent us from losing some of our additional detailed stats data that we gather for gearsofwar.com. Due to the large number of concurrent matches, our stats gathering servers were not able to collect data for every single match played. The Xbox LIVE leaderboards are 100% accurate but our existing stats web pages may have some missing data prior to the update.
• A fix to address the issue where some players were unable to start the story-based campaign if Xbox LIVE was down or unavailable.