A variety of questions.

[BerserkerBarrage]

What's going on, people. When it comes to these forums and Freedom Force in general, I am just a new boy...a stranger in this town.

First question: I recently bought both games on Steam, and I tried out the first one, but I ran into a bug where my character runs off the map, endlessly. Apparently this is a persistent problem, so much so that someone had a fix that involved downloading a something or other. But I am at least 1/5th caveman, so I'm frightened by new things. Has anyone else downloaded a fix for that bug, and did it work out for you?

Second question: I briefly played around with the "create a character", where you create a custom character and make his stats and arrange his powers. But when it came time to tweak the appearance, I had no ability to change anything. Are the different assets locked behind the campaign? If they are, that's troubling since I have that walk-off-map problem issued above, and I really just got these games to design and make characters forever.

Final question: Modding. I want to bring in custom characters and play around with them. I'd love to make guys like Batman or anyone else. I've heard that we cannot use custom heroes in the main "story", we just have to use the game's characters. Are there mods to change that? I'd love to permanently add characters to my "roster" during every mission, whether or not it makes sense for the situation. And I don't just mean reskins. I mean, if we have The Ant and Minuteman teaming up for a crucial story point, I'd love to also be able to have whoever I want there. If that's not possible, that's perfectly fine, I was just wondering.

Alright, those are all my questions. Sorry if this isn't the right place for those, I wasn't quite sure where to put everything. So I took a chance at the craps table, so to speak. Let's hope I rolled high!

[WyldFyre]

Welcome to the forums!

Not sure about the bug. I haven't personally encountered that. Someone else may have an idea there.

On the customization - Every character is represented by a mesh and skin. These files reside in folders usually named for the character, although there are 'generic' characters as well. When creating a character, you need to specify a mesh and skin for them. There should be drop boxes on your character creation screen to allow you to choose these assets. Generic meshes are called male_basic or male_cape for male characters and female_basic or female_longhair etc.

For adding custom characters to the game, there are literally tens of thousands of assets which have been created by the community here. The museum link in my signature has a bunch and there are others by Randomdays, DeanJo, doctorruina and others still being made. Aperusal of the request and release forums should get you a cornucopia of links to the content created for this game.

Warning!- it can be a huge amount of content. I personally have several TB of content and am trying to (slowly as RL permits) get most of it up on the museum.

Have fun and welcome to the party.

[Randomdays]

As Wyldfyre said.

When you create a custom character you pick the mesh and skin, but if the mesh has more than one skin you can cycle through them and pick one.

For changing out characters in campaign, that's difficult. There was a mod that swapped the main characters out for the Fantastic Four, but only them. I'm not sure if there's a mod to let you pick any hero though.

There's various mods called "Custom Force X" that might let you play as any character once installed.

https://freedomforce4ever.com/graveyard/customforce-x.htm

Its been a long time, but I think if you beat a campaign level, it opens up to be playable as a single level in the Danger Room in FF - beat the level normally, then go to the Danger Room, select "campaign mission" from the top menu and any level you beat should be on the list, and you can remove the default character already chosen and replace it with yours. You'd have to beat the game at least once, but then you can play it, one level at a time, with any heroes you want. Character limits are still in place though, I think. If the level is set for two characters, you can only have two of your characters picked, not the max of four.

FFvt3R is probably the same.

Any character in game not only has a mesh and a skin, but also a "Hero file." The hero file keeps all the info on what powers and abilities you've selected for your character. There are thousands of premade hero files out there. This saves you the effort of setting up someone like Batman yourself. I think each premade hero file is also specific to a mesh and skin though.

[DoctorRuina]

Welcome to the forum
I recommend you install ffx3.3 to add more attributes and skills to the characters.
https://ffx.freedomforce4ever.com/downloads.htm
For create the hero files, I use this guide, adapting stats from the Mayfair Games and Marvel RPGs. Also the official handbook. There are also pages with stats for thousands of characters.
https://www.freedomreborn.net/forums/index.php?topic=54775.0
Any help you need, don't hesitate to ask.