Freedom Force Character Creation Guide

Freedom Force comes with a powerful character creation system that allows you to create virtually any Superhero. With over 50 attributes and hundreds of pre-made powers, you take your favourite comic book hero and bring him to life. In addition to the dozens of models that ship with the game, you can download free meshes and skins from sites like http://www.freedomforcecenter.com/ and http://www.skindex.net/. At the time of this writing, there are more than 50 meshes and 500 skins already available for download!

Despite the enormous power of the Freedom Force character creation system, creating your very own custom character is very easy and straightforward. Just follow these simple steps:

First of all, press the ‘characters’ button in the main menu and you’ll be taken to the Characters screen. In the demo, the characters screen can also be reached by pressing the ‘characters’ button in the base screen.

This is the Characters screen. From here, you can create a new custom hero, and edit, delete or copy an existing one. Create a new hero by pressing the ‘New’ button.

Select A Mesh: A mesh is the model that will be used for your hero. Each mesh has it’s own distinctive set of animations, and some meshes are better suited for certain roles than others. Choose a mesh and hit OK.

You are now in the character creation screen. Here you can define your character’s Stats, Powers and Attributes. A character’s Stats determine his basic strengths and abilities – how strong he is, how fast he runs and so forth. Powers represent his active abilities: fireball throwing, teleportation, melee attacks or magical shields are all powers. Finally, Attributes represent his inherent strengths and weaknesses; resistance to fire, vulnerability to radiation, the ability to fly or razor-sharp claws are all attributes. The final important attribute for a character is prestige, which represents how many prestige points are needed to recruit your custom character into the game. All stats, powers and attributes have an associated prestige cost, and the more powerful a character is, the higher his prestige cost is going to be.

First of all, decide on what stats your character will have. Stats have a range from 1 to 10; the normal person is assumed to have stats of around 2. But your character isn’t a puny normal person, she’s a superhero! Each step in a stat is progressively more expensive than the last.

A character’s main stats are:

Str – Strength, the characters ability to lift heavy objects. A high strength allows your character to deal more powerful melee attacks.

Spd – Speed, the higher this stat is, the faster your hero moves.

Agl – Agility, the ability to hit and dodge in melee. The higher this stat is, the more likely it is that you’ll dodge attacks and hit with melee attacks of your own.

End – Endurance, a measure of your hero’s grit and toughness. Your hero’s health points are based on your endurance; the higher it is, the more damage your hero can take.

Eng – Energy. All heroes use energy to power their attacks and superpowers; the higher this stat is, the quicker their energy pool recovers. Without a good energy stat, your hero can run out of power and stun herself if she tries to use too many expensive powers.

Next you’ll need to select your hero’s Attributes. Here you can choose from a wide range of special abilities – regeneration, armor-plating, flying – the list seems endless. Not all attributes are good, some actually penalize your character, which gives you points back that you can spend elsewhere.

Now that you’ve chosen your stats and attributes, its time to get down to the real nitty-gritty, the power creation system. First click on the ‘powers’ tab. Here you’ll see that your hero already has a full complement of powers. You can delete these and create your own, or edit their appearance and properties. Finally, you can ‘level up’ your powers by pressing the plus button next to the power name. Levelling up a power costs points, but it improves almost every aspect of a power. Powers have five levels of power, and reducing a power’s level below 1 deletes that power from the list.

Let’s create a new power for your hero. Click on the ‘Purchase’ button.

Select a Power: Powers are divided into eight categories – Melee, Projectile, Beam, Area, Direct, Active Defense, Passive Defense and Special.

Melee covers punches, kicks and so forth.

Projectile powers are ranged attacks that launch a missile of some sort at a target. Projectiles can have several special abilities, such as homing, multiplication or explosive radius.

Beam attacks are slightly more limited than projectiles, but are less likely to strike intervening obstacles.

Area powers strike everything in a radius around the character.

Direct attacks are ranged powers that never miss and cannot be dodged. They are expensive but powerful, and are often used to inflict bad states on enemies.

Active Defences are shields that can protect against a wide range of attacks, but generally cost energy to use and have a limited duration.

Passive Defences are more expensive defenses that are always on, and have a chance of automatically protecting the character against certain attacks or states.

For now, let’s make a melee power. Click on the first power in the melee list and hit ‘OK’.

Okay, this is the melee power screen. Here you can decide what your melee attack can do. There are several important fields here.

Damage Type: there are a lot of different damage types you can choose from here. Your attack can do dozens of different things, from dealing damage to inflicting a bad state like blindness or freezing them in a block of ice!

Magnitude: If the attack deals out raw damage, magnitude defines exactly how much damage is dealt. For attacks that cause bad states (like freeze or stasis), magnitude represents how difficult it is for an enemy to resist that power. If your power has a magnitude of ‘none’, then the enemy will always resist it!

Energy Point Cost: All powers have an associated energy cost. The more energy a power uses, the cheaper it is. A power with little or no energy cost will be a lot more expensive, but also more useful.

Stun: Stunning is a very important concept in Freedom Force. If you stun an enemy with an attack, he becomes helpless for a few seconds, giving you a chance to further pound on him. Stun is represented by a percentage chance – the higher the stun level, the higher the chance.

Knockback: Knockback is a way of inflicting extra damage on an enemy and getting him out of the fight for a moment. The higher the knockback, the more extreme the effect – light knockback might only send a bad guy sliding for a few feet, but extreme knockback will send him into the statosphere!

Swiftness: Swiftness is a measure of how hard the attack is to dodge.

Arc: Arc melee attacks strike everything in a certain radius around the character, making them much more powerful than normal melee attacks.

Power Flags: Most powers also have ‘power flags’, which appear as tick boxes on the power screen. Power flags change the way a power works – for example, ticking ‘up knockback’ on a melee power causes the knockback force it deals to be directed up instead of across, which knocks enemies into the air.

Now that we’ve defined what our melee power does, its time to set up the animation and fx for it. Setting these things up is really easy and works the same way for all powers. Click on the ‘animation and fx’ tab. Here you can round out a power by choosing what animation and special effect will be used for that power. As you can see, there are three fields that change based on the animation you choose:

Start Time: Start time tells you how long it takes to launch the power. Think of it as a ‘wind up’.

Total Time: Once a power has been launched, a character still has to take a moment to finish the motion they were performing. Think of it as a ‘wind down’.

No. Contacts: The number of contacts defines the number of times a power is launched. If a melee attack has three contacts, then it has the potential to hit three times, while a projectile with three contact points will fire three times with a single shot. Contact points are a part of the character’s animation and can not be changed.

Finally, select a special effect from the list. Pick whatever special effect you like – special effects are cosmetic and have no bearing on how a power works. Now just name the power by clicking in the name box in the top left corner and type in the power’s name, then hit ‘OK’. Your custom melee power is now complete!

Projectile and beam attacks strike targets at a range. They have the following additional fields:

Velocity: Is a measure of how quickly the projectile or beam moves towards it’s target. A low velocity attack travels relatively slowly, while a very fast velocity attack is virtually instanteous.

Radius: If a projectile attack has a radius, it becomes an explosive attack which hits everything within that radius on impact. Beam attacks cannot have a radius.

Range: Range defines how far the attack can travel.

Accuracy: Accuracy is the base chance the attack has to hit. The farther away a target is, the lower your accuracy becomes, so a good accuracy is important. Certain attributes, like crack shot, can increase overall accuracy for all your powers.

Area attacks strike everything in a radius around your hero. Area attacks can be very useful if bad guys surround your hero, but they’re expensive, and you have to be careful not to catch friendly characters in the blast.

Active defenses protect your character against certain kinds of damage and attacks. While an active defense is up, your hero cannot use other superpowers. By default, a hero cannot move while using an active defense, but the ability to move while using the shield can be bought. Active defenses use the following fields:

Damage Blocked: Here you can tick the boxes to decide what kinds of damage your shield blocks against. The more types of damage your shield can block, the more expensive it becomes.

Block Type: By default, a shield has a block type of ‘normal’, meaning the shield simply takes the damage dealt instead of the hero. You can also choose from these options:

· Deflect: Instead of striking the shield, the attack is deflected in a random direction.

· Reflect: The attack is directed right back at the attacker who fired it.

· Redirect: The attack is directed at the nearest enemy character.

· Absorb: The shield absorbs the attack, which returns energy points to your energy pool.

EP Cost: Defines how much energy an active defense costs to use. The cheaper the energy cost, the more expensive the power.

Duration: How long an active defense stays up.

Hit Points: A measure of how much damage a shield can take before it collapses. For shields that reflect or absorb attacks, hit points are irrelevant.

Passive defenses are more powerful and expensive than active defenses, because they don’t cost energy to use and are always on. The trade-off is that they’re not as reliable.

Damage Type: Like active defenses, passive defenses don’t automatically protect you against everything. You have to select which damage and attack types are blocked.

Block Type: works the same way for passive defenses as active defenses.

Success Rating: Passive defenses don’t always work 100% of the time, unlike active defenses. The success rating is the percentage chance of the defense activating if you’re hit with an attack.

The info tab: Here you round out the final details of your character. These details include:

Name: You can name your hero at any time by clicking on the name box in the top left corner of the screen and typing in a name...

Skin: you can choose your hero's skin at any time by clicking the left and right arrows next to the model of the hero. Changing a hero's skin changes his or

her appearance within the game. Keep in mind that their appearance will only change if there are extra skins available for that mesh.

Material: material describes what your hero is made out of, be it ordinary flesh, steel or even rubber. Certain materials better protect your hero against

damage, but cost you points.

Voice: here you can select the voice your hero uses. Just select one from the list.

That's it, your custom hero is now complete! Take some time to experiment with the hero creation system; we hope you'll find it to be fun, flexible and powerful.

Good luck heroes, now fight the good fight!