I wonder how exactly space travel and exploration of planets is going to work. Will we be able to fly our ship manually, and be able to seamlessly land on planets, like No Man’s Sky (and Star Citizen)? Or will space travel mostly take place on menu screens, and only small parts of planets are explorable (similar to Mass Effect)? The former would make the game much bigger, but would also have to heavily rely on procedural generation, while the latter would make the game feel very restricted, but would allow them to hand-craft most of the environments.
I personally think the best solution would be if the game took place only within a single (largely unexplored) star system, as opposed to a whole Galaxy or whatever. By focusing only on a single solar system, they would only have to design a relatively small number of planets (let’s say around 10 or so), which would allow them to put much more effort into each individual planet, while still having each planet fully explorable. They would probably still need some procedural generation to create most of the planets’ surfaces, but can sprinkle tons of hand-crafted locations and points of interests on them. And a solar system still has enough room for asteroids, space stations, moons and other kinds of celestial objects that are floating around.
Also, keeping everything within a single system would also keep the in-game scale (distances and travel times) more manageable. Manually flying our ship from one side of a solar system to another wouldn’t be nearly as implausible as traveling between different part of the universe (which would in practice take centuries, even with faster-than-light travel).