The first game set after the end of the Terran-Kilrathi War, Wing Commander IV depicts a galaxy in the midst of a chaotic transition, with human civilians, Kilrathi survivors and former soldiers on both sides attempting to restabilize their lives.

Wing Commander IV is a simulator game in which players take on the role of Col. Christoper "Maverick" Blair, a veteran pilot of enormous repute, as he flies starfighters.

Each fighter comes with qualities such as durability, maneuverability, top speed, mounted energy weapons, and number of available missile hardpoints, whose loadouts may be specified by the player.

The Kilrathi survivors, now led by Melek nar Kiranka, retainer to the late Prince Thrakhath, are having greater problems than they had during the war, since their racial and societal makeup revolves around hunting and killing.

This transport is destroyed by a wing of mysterious fighters equipped with a new anti-ship weapon that incinerates the target's contents, leaving only a burning shell behind.

Colonel Christopher 'Maverick' Blair, retired, is trying to make out a living on a desert world as a farmer, when he is recalled to active military service by Tolwyn.

Within five minutes of Blair taking the cockpit, the station he's heading to is attacked by an Avenger-class fighter claiming Border Worlds allegiance.

After flying sorties under Paulsen's command, Blair either heads to the officer's lounge with Maniac or ventures down to the flight deck without proper authorization.

Soon after, Paulsen calls Blair and Chang in for a surprise mission briefing: Eisen has defected to the Border Worlds and is fleeing in a shuttle, with Maniac piloting.

Eisen confides that he's been in touch with connections back on Earth, and it seems that the nascent Confed-Border Worlds war is being instigated by elements within Confed.

Pliers, clambering aboard in the aftermath, discovers a squadron of sleek black fighters and a single example of their incendiary weapon, called "Dragons" and "Flash-Paks" respectively.

There he discovers a secret starbase, guarded by the TCS Vesuvius, and manned by thousands of black-clad soldiers, including Seether, collectively known as the Black Lance.

Blair learns that their leader is Admiral Geoffrey Tolwyn, who is instigating a war between the Border Worlds and Confed, with the goal being constant war-driven evolution of tactics and technology, to prepare the Confederation to meet the next hostile alien race.

Though helped by the intervention of the TCS Mount St. Helens, sister ship to the Vesuvius, and its new captain, Eisen, the Intrepid is unsuccessful in stopping Tolwyn.

Blair will either regain his rank as Colonel and be seen helping Panther train new pilots at the Academy or using Black Lance assets to crush rebellions with Hawk at his side as the new Admiral, depending on the general tone of his choices throughout the game.

[1][2] The majority of this budget went into the production of the game's full motion video scenes, which were shot on actual sets instead of a greenscreen and using 35mm film instead of digital capture.

In this edition, the cutscene video was upgraded to full DVD quality (made possible due to the fact that the scenes were originally shot on film).

[6][7] Likewise, a port for the Panasonic M2 was in the works by Origin Systems and slated to be one of the console's launch titles but never happened due to its eventual cancellation.

In 2021, a fan project known as Wing Commander IV: Remastered, began development of a version using upscaled video assets from the original series with the goal of producing a modern remake of the game.

[13] PC Data, which tracked computer game sales in the United States, ranked Wing Commander IV at #1 for the month of February 1996.

"[28] A reviewer for Next Generation criticized that the interactive portions are essentially unchanged from Wing Commander III: "... with $10 million [the game's budget], you'd think the programmers could have optimized the code.

"[29] Bob Strauss wrote in Entertainment Weekly that "I've come to the conclusion that the Wing Commander series has two reasons for existence: to prolong the career of Mark Hamill (who has leveraged his big-screen space-jockey credentials into this most prestigious of CD-ROM franchises) and to force technological laggards to trade in their old PC clunkers for the whiz-bang models of the moment.

"[27]Wing Commander IV was nominated as Computer Games Strategy Plus's 1996 "Science-Fiction Simulation" of the year, although it lost to Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri.

[37] It won the 1996 Spotlight Award for "Best Use of Video" from the Game Developers Conference,[38] and was a nominee in the "Best Script, Story or Interactive Writing" category.

Critics generally approved of the cutscenes, praising the story,[5][26][41] acting,[5][26][30] and full motion video quality,[5][30][41] but assessed the gameplay as average at best.

"[30] Crispin Boyer of EGM devoted his entire PlayStation version review to the quality of the conversion, commenting that whereas Wing Commander III was a straight port, Wing Commander IV had been effectively redesigned to accommodate the hardware, in particular simplifying the control scheme and redrawing the HUDs so that they can be read on the lower resolution of a TV monitor.