I noticed that they included the option to have more advanced species start alongside you (I'm assuming these are different from the dying empires). And since we saw that there are also species that can organically form after you, it means more uneven gameplay.
This makes me happy. I like it when the playing field is all over the place. It doesn't make sense for everyone to be at the same level in a space 4x.
Yeah, on the one hand you can set the game to favour certain species. Something like the favoured nations in EU.
On the other, as the second part of the Blorg stream shows, there's pre-space aliens seeded across the galaxy, presumably in different stages of technological development, and they can eventually enter the galactic stage. In the stream, there was this Early Space Age species which the presenters encountered, and it almost immediately made the leap to spacefaring race.
That's great, and I'm assuming/hoping for the aforementioned different stages of development. You may have this Early Space Age species whose space leap is imminent, others in an Industrial Age 200-300 years away from it, and perhaps even some Pre-Industrial/Primitive ones which might be anything from 500 to thousands of years away. All theoretically within the scope of a single game, given time and, perhaps, foreign intervention! Ultimately and ideally, Primitive species could also randomly crop up on planets where there was previously no sapient life at all.