Freedom Force Interview

Gamer’s Hell has conducted an interview with Irrational Games’ Jonathan Chey, asking the lead designer and project manager several questions about the recently released Freedom Force. Here’s a little something to get you started:

Q: A lot of the replayability in Freedom Force does in my opinion come from the great ability of customizing and upgrading your heroes. Would you mind explaining the possibilities the gamers have?

A: Sure, well this is where a lot of the depth of the game lies. For a start, characters gain experience in the usual sort of way from going on missions. This experience can be used to purchase new attributes and powers for your existing powers. The powers are stacked in tiers so you have to purchase low-level powers before getting access to the more exotic ones.

But the true power of the system comes into play when you create custom characters. Here you can set the stats, attributes, powers and material of your new character as you see fit. In fact, you can even build new powers for that character from scratch. For example, you can choose to purchase a beam power, set its damage type and magnitude, how much energy it uses, what its range is and so on. You can even choose which animation the character uses to fire it and which effect will be attached to it.

As well as this, characters are defined by stats including strength, endurance, speed and so on and by attributes that determine things like whether the character can fly or burrow and so on. Finally, the material the character is made from determines their vulnerabilities to different kinds of damage like heat, cold or radiation.

Basically, it’s a system for building your favorite comic book characters.