X4: Foundations
Intense overall intensityWhat's in it
Narcotic and alcohol analogues (spaceweed and spacefuel) are illegal wares the player can manufacture in owned stations and buy and sell for profit.
The player can turn pirate — raiding ships, demanding cargo, and smuggling illegal wares — as an ordinary path through the simulated economy.
Combat is ship-to-ship in space: the player's guns and fleets destroy enemy craft in bloodless explosions, with no wounded bodies or gore shown.
The setting's backstory involves interstellar war and a machine faction methodically wiping out life across sectors, referenced through the universe rather than shown as personal atrocity.
Who can reach your kid
What it is
X4: Foundations is a single-player space sandbox in which you begin flying one ship and can grow into the commander of trading fleets, factories and an economic empire. You explore a fully simulated galaxy of factions that trade, ally and war with one another whether or not you are present, and you choose your own path — honest trader, station-building tycoon, fleet admiral, or pirate. Combat is entirely between spacecraft: ships exchange fire and explode, and crews are captured by boarding, with no blood, gore or injury shown on people. The universe includes illegal narcotic and alcohol commodities the player can produce and sell, and criminal play such as smuggling and raiding civilian ships. There is no real-money spending and no online or chat features.
How it's framed
The game frames its content through economics and consequence rather than spectacle: piracy, smuggling and attacking traders are viable strategies but carry faction-reputation costs, war is presented as the shifting balance of a living simulation, and violence is the abstract clash of ships and fleets rather than depicted harm to individuals.
Details
- Developer
- Egosoft
- Publisher
- Egosoft
- Released
- Nov 30, 2018
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