X4: Foundations - Gameplay Official Video - IGN (2024)

Check out this video for the upcoming game and take a look at some of the features. Manage your assets and explore space in first person. Fly every ship, trade and fight to build your empire with modular station construction and think carefully when embarking on an epic journey. The game is slated for release on November 30, 2018 on PC. Transcript: We feel pretty confident to say that X4: Foundations is the space sim with the most possibilities of things to do in space. The biggest sandbox this side of the galaxy just go bigger so to say. To enjoy X4 you don't need to know any of the previous games between 1999s XP on the frontier to X3: Reunion and beyond. Or have read any Helge Kautz's books, also set in the X universe. That said, we have really focused on connecting X4 with that huge established universe, so everybody will get a sense of that deep universe with a lot of backstory. One key feature at the start, something that people missed from X: Rebirth a lot. Yes, you can fly almost every ship in the universe personally. From small fighters with a two man crew with you as the pilot to huge carriers that can be home to an entire fleet. You can walk around the bridge, give orders to ships via the map interface and watch the crew develop better skills. Or you can simply go to the captain's console and steer the ship yourself. The biggest challenge with this is having a seamless transition between all these different scales. You walk on a station, climb a ladder into a ship cockpit, fly it onto a larger frigate, climb out and walk to the cockpit of that frigate, and land that ship on a carrier, only to get out and walk to the bridge, all seamless. Also no loading pauses ever, not even when going through jump gates. X4 plays years after the previous X games. There have been a great number of incidents that have led to massive changes in the X universe over only a few decades. Entire civilizations disconnected from their home worlds, past origins forgotten, a huge crisis for most, of from where X4: Foundation starts, you have a glimpse into a possibly brighter future and you, the player, have the chance to shape it. That is because X4 features are completely dynamic universe. The economy as well as universe structure and political alliances are all dynamic. Instead of a predesigned linear plot, the game even has a wider variety of procedurally adapted stories. This is the reason why we can comfortably say, it is the biggest sandbox, not just because of the literal size of the universe, because of that level of influence that you as the player can have on that universe. Take the economy for example. Of course at the start of the game, you can do trading, It is one of the core activities in the X games, not that you have to do it, there are plenty of other ways to get rich, but trading is usually involved even if you prefer to steal or plunder those wares in the first place. You can personally trade with the first ship you fly, upgraded it, afford largest ships, jump into those or simply command them to trade remotely. You build a fleet of increasingly larger trade ships all the way up to your own massive capital ships, that can transport huge amounts of wares all at once. Then you have building, another cool feature of the X games that greatly evolved. Now, thanks to the new super powerful 3D map, you can create any kind of space station, factory or shipyard, entirely from station blocks. This adds not just a lot of creative design, but also the ability to react to this dynamic economy and build the best self-sufficient factories that nobody has ever designed before. At the bottom end of such a self-sufficient factory would be raw resources of course. Raw resources involve mining, but also collector ships and the variety of techniques to find the best deals. Again, everybody can choose whether to play any of this personally, or whether to send ships with your own crew to do it remotely, or you simply bite the bullet and pay other factions for the finished goods. So again, total freedom. No need to play any of these aspects of the game. But if you do, even manual mining can be great fun. It can start with a small freighter, with limited freight space and equipped with mining lasers, all the way up to flying your own capital mining ship. Mining personally is made more lucrative by combining it with exploring our living universe. There are lots of things to be found. Whether procedurally generated or manually placed by level designers, we mix these two design philosophies to get the best result - a living, breathing universe. With X4, we have added a number of really cool things you can do to unlock those treasures, artifacts and super valuable resources. For example, your spacesuit. You can leave the safety of your ship and break into a secured ancient derelict station or flying to the smallest folds of a huge asteroid in search of crystals. Like everything else in the game, your spacesuit you can be upgraded and even be used in large battles to place bombs on stations, or during espionage to scan for secrets. So no matter whether you prefer trade, fight, build or the many mission chains, you will find something worth investing yourself in. If you want you can cycle through the many play styles. Do you build large fleets to launch your own wars instead of just participating in the war missions of the MPC factions, or do you invest in creating an ever larger self-supporting economy, become a rich mogul and try to personally protect your empire from competition and enemies? Enemies which become more numerous, should you choose a more pirate focus style of gameplay. Or do you follow the mission chains and subscribe to more faction jobs, be it police activity or as a pirate. Be a war mission or the story surrounding the very special player H-Q. We will show more about the play H-Q later, but we can say that while there is no singular main plot, there is one very special story with some big rewards. Most players will probably want to play this in order to get a number of unique blueprints and technologies. The biggest design effort during the development of X4: Foundations definitely went into the user interface especially, the 3D map system. It opened up the possibility to make a game with this vast amount of features and still keep it controllable and easy to get into. X4 supports all models of controls, mouse, gamepad, HOTAS and even advance to very different physical models. Normally, the ship computer stabilizes your ship movements, but this can be turned off for advanced flight maneuvers and the more physically correct space experience. Of course, X4: Foundations will not be the end of this development. We have tried to bring as big a universe as possible for a release this year. Several factions of the Argon, Teladi and Paranid race with multiple economies each. The Paranid, for example, a race with very deep religious beliefs, broke up into two competing empires and now fight a war against each other. Then there of course also a lot of potential adversaries, those where you have a choice by the different pirate factions and those where you don't, like the infamous Xenon. A race of advanced artificial general intelligence once built by mankind themselves to help colonize space. There will be expansions, which will bring more races, their ships, stations and lots of missions into the X4 universe. But that takes time and resources. Our goal is to bring the first big expansions within about one year.

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