The developers are still unfortunately at the point of 'promising the sky' and not yet having had to deliver.
To me it looks like the 'kernel' of what they are doing so far, the world building, the game engine, the scope of game play they want to accomplish, all sound nearly too good to be true.
The devil's in the details, though.
As we all know from years of Eve, how the powers that be decide to balance ships, game play, and what exactly you can get away with can turn 'sandbox' into 'barely playable unbalanced wtf.'
Even if the game falls far, far short...the simple fact that one of the main game tenants is that you can have a multi player crewed ship and fly the space lanes hauling or pirating or exploring, moving around the inside of your ship, manning turrets and ship systems as a group, and then docking up and doing the 'space bar' thing in third person with your friends, means it's already giving me from the start things that I've wanted from Eve for the entire time I played.
That they are planning to introduce FPS combat for ship boarding and piracy just makes my pea brain explode with possibilities. Ambushing a cargo hauler or military ship, disabling it, and landing a boarding party and giving them what-for with a blaster and stealing their cargo and zooming off and then landing and selling the stolen goods at some seedy space station cantina avoiding the police the whole time? I'm effing sold on that.
It's the 'full service' space MMO in theory.
But devil's in the details.