Frankly, I find the whole thing baffling. I know hyped games and in-development games can be hard to follow, but there's even more misconceptions with this one than there are usually. It's ridiculous.
If you still find this baffling between, watch the Angry Joe Review
He shows you where the misconceptions come from, and to be honest if I hadn't already suspected (back from my experience with X Rebirth) That all E3 interviews are total nonsense and if a indy dev gets on any big comedians stage, 100% of what he says is nonsense! I would have believed this hype as well.
multiplayer (meeting other players) (was CLEARLY alluded to in E3 2014 / E3 2015 interviews)
faction system with benefits depending on your playstyle
border regions with conflicts between races, where you can choose sides between factions
ship discovery (naming and scanning)
drastic ship differences between the races
free flight on the planets
real story (with set pieces and such) leading to the "center" with proper ending
making interesting discoveries related to that story on planets
#pure desert worlds (no such thing)
#pure ocean worlds (you can't land on water, so no such thing)
#//the # stuff is because that wouldn't really give the game much more point, just some more variance
You know, stuff that would give the game some structure, some point to all the grind.
Dunno whether ocean and desert worlds are in the game, but from my perusing of streams I never saw em... so I'd guess nope.
And I think this is why so many people got the wrong impression of this game pre release