Okay let me try to describe what the starting gameplay loop is probably going to be like based on what I've read in previews and my recent experience with other space sim games.
*) The previews say you start out on a planet with a ship right? I forget whether your ship is damaged or whatever, but in any case you start out at least in one solar system. That system will have a space station where you can buy stuff like gear, loot, and upgrades for your ship. You'll need to get a hyperdrive for your ship to travel to other star systems (and eventually reach the center of the universe). Hyperdrives are really expensive, so you need to earn money.
*) You can try to get money by mining resources on the planets, discovering new creatures, finding points of interest on each planet, or encountering other ships that might be engaged in battles. I think the previews also say you can engage with cops like GTA but with space ships. In any case, you will possibly need to thoroughly explore that star system to earn money.
*) After you do some of those things enough times to afford a hyperdrive, you're probably going to want to buy some goods (like food or precious metals) that are cheap in whatever star system you're in. This is pretty much how Elite games begin and it's the backbone of those games' economies. In Elite this depends on the economy of that system but I don't know how that's gonna work out in NMS. Then you'll warp to another star system. In other similar games hyperdrives have a limited range and I imagine they will in NMS too. Hopefully you'll warp to a system where those goods you just bought are more expensive, and you'll be able to sell them for profit.
*) Previews have confirmed that refueling your hyperdrive will be quite expensive, so you're gonna be in that new star system for a while and will have to likely do things there to earn money. Probably whatever you did in the last system to earn money. The next star system you're in might end up being more or less violent than where you just came from. You might have to shoot a motherfucker, in which case you might get resources from their downed ship. If you decide to keep buying and trading goods between star systems you're basically becoming a space trucker. The presence of cops in NMS means the stores might even have illegal goods (like drugs or rare animals) if it's anything like Elite. In that case it basically becomes a Han Solo game, which is precisely how Hello Games describes NMS.
*) Eventually you'll want to upgrade your ship further, or maybe get a whole new ship because Hello Games makes it seem like you'll start out with a shitty one. Maybe you want to be able to survive in more violent star systems. Maybe you need to explore a planet with toxic atmosphere. In any case, you'll want to keep earning money to afford those upgrades or new ships. In that sense it becomes a little bit like Animal Crossing.
*) And then you'll probably just rinse and repeat that, getting progressively better gear, getting into increasingly dangerous space battles, and hopefully exploring increasingly diverse planets.
I know, but this is a well-established genre on PC (that admittedly has been dead for years up until now). The only procedurally-generated space sim on a console I can think of is the Europe-only NES version of the first Elite.
