I played for awhile in the beta.
It's very much a MMORPG in the Elite vein - trading, mining, and NPC killing are the main treadmill activities, and you can do things like piracy and other things (manufacturing?) a bit later on.
The graphics I felt were beautiful, if a bit repetitive. I liked the ships too, but some of them seemed to be asymmetrical for the sake of being asymmetrical.
My best memory in beta was when my buddy discovered a trade route way out in the proverbial 'boonies' (uncivilized space, maybe two- or three-dozen jumps in), running drugs between systems at a huge markup.
Once we did that for awhile, and other people found out and started doing the same, we next decided to set up camp along the trade route, and steal the drugs that other people were smuggling.
We'd figure out the best bottleneck in the trade route, warp in, and set up 'camp' by dropping an object and bookmarking it so we could warp back later. We'd then use the 'long range scanner' to see how many ships were in the neighboring system, and wait for them to come through to ours.
While waiting, we'd be hitting 'refresh' on the 'nearby targets' UI like crazy - very tense, silent moments. Very fun.
Once they came in, one of us would target, approach, and use our 'warp jammer' so they couldn't fly away - then we'd make the obligatory 'jettison or die!' remark, and if they didn't jettison quickly, we'd open up.
It was great fun until we pissed off some huge corporation, and they sent a gazillion ships to come station-camp us.
It was that battle, and the horrible FPS- and network-lag that ensued, that convinced me that I couldn't play the game long-term.
Was fun for awhile, though.
-Kordos
