Just played it for an hour and a half.. Still havent really gotten out of the tutorial-ish style missions.
Optimization-wise, i have a higher end computer, and its fairly smooth with maxed out settings most of the time, but still hiccups every few minutes for a few seconds during normal flying around... happens especially when entering/leaving cockpit as well, which i guess involves a lot of loading/unloading..
Not unplayable for me but...
im on a core i7 3820 4core[hyperthreaded] overclocked to 4.4ghz, with a geforce gtx 680, overclocked to 1110mhz /w 4gigs. Also have 16gigs of ram, but have a non-ssd harddrive.
Alot of the docking/station going around stuff looks like it will get repeative and boring after awhile... at least you don't have to -hunt- for people if you don't want to, and can instead just comm a ship/station and ask for a specific-job-postion-filling guy and they'll tell you someone even if its not in the same station/immediate area. So you can find people easily enough.
The WEIRDEST thing so far is that the vast majority of people seem to talk with young voices but 95% of the people look really old.
... The old people thing is... really really odd.. It actually is odd enough to make me feel weird, like i've entered into a parallel universe where nearly everyone is like 75 years old. [Not a exaggeration, theres maybe one or two young/middle aged people on a station to every 20 or so old 75+ people]
As for actual combat... haven't experienced it much yet, but seems, average so far... probably need upgrades/better stuff, which is in fact the mission i was on before i took a break.
Drones: They feel exactly the same as the skunk, just mini-ships basically. I only had a tiny fighter drone and a scanning/hacking drone bought.. didnt manage to figure out the hacking either...
Universe: Yea, it certainly feels a lot more busy. i like that they made the tradelanes into a sort of minigame, where you jump lanes to draft people to get their faster. And the pure amount of ships/ the size of stations is vastly more interesting/cooler then the previous x titles.
GUI/UI: It feels very clunky, I need to hit C->3->5->-5->1 to ask a person where a guy selling drones is from my ship, waiting a half second inbetween.. Its mostly navigating a pick 1-6 of these options then do that again several/many times to achieve something... which feels slow and clunky to me, even if it doesnt take much screenspace. The actual Combat Hud, and cockpit feel good, although i really wish i could -move- my head around by holding down alt or something, as most modern-vehicle style games let you do. Also, actually walking around the bridge would be nice, instead of going immediately to the main pilot seat.
Also: crashed once in a hour and a half, and doesnt like alt-tabbing with multiple screens.
Still have hopes for the game, but i would advise holding off purchacing for a few weeks/month or so, let a few patches come out, maybe wait for a mod/patch that changes the average age by negative 40 years or so...