Some more information out the gate:
Characters will be custom-made; you're meant to start from the bottom in the context of the setting, and the way you work up is through space piracy. What this entails is probably both what we can expect from past Ubisoft forays into open-world; but I'm willing to put a bet on how far Ancel will attempt to take it.
As for the setting itself, it seems on further analysis to kind of follow the route that the first BG&E was going; and it kind of took me going back recently and replaying through it to think about that. The first game's themes were clearly reflective of the game's production timeframe, you think about what kind of world we were living in just past the new millennium and one of the big things people were talking about back then, probably even moreso than they are today, was the idea of collusion in the government, cover-ups, using disaster or threat of war to enforce complacency and subtle manipulation of the populace to a single side. That was the big political drama unfolding around the time up until the very climax of the Bush years.
So maybe I'm just overthinking this way too much, BUT the reason they've decided to go with this whole diversity angle and the themes pertaining to classism, the definition of humanity and the rights afforded to them, slavery, and inequality in general is because at least a fraction of those are, in the same way, the political drama being expressed today. You're a pirate, an outlaw, and you're to lead a band of outcasts, presumably both humans and hybrids, in pursuit of a better life...or to stick it to the man, or who knows. So I see, from that, it could go two ways.
On the one hand, we might get a virtue signaling piece of crap that you're only gonna want to play once and then, when you've collected and upgraded everything, you'll never want to go back to again.
On the other, if they manage to overcome the pitfall they fell into last time ( in that there was no 'beyond good and evil' to be really found in the first game, it was a very cut and dry kind of morality ), the pitfall of Molyneuxism ( promising too much before you can deliver ), and the spike-ridden pitfall of appealing to Social Justice in spite of your actual consumer base; then we could potentially get a really great game.
Time'll tell I guess.
