Finally got the Elite:Dangerous beta,
First Impression: HOLY COW!
Second Impression: SWEET MOTHER!
Third Impression: WOW!
The game is playable, ships quite flyable with mouse & keyboard, but it's not FUN with mouse and keyboard, I'm looking at a Sytek X-55 HOTAS Rhino, to be different from all you guys buying Warthogs!.
Awesome touch that they've done a Steve and scoured star catalogues to add 150,000 real stars to the game, and even gone the extra mile and added all the known exo-planets.
The feeling of scale is truly stupendous.
It's exceeded my expectations (for the little I've seen so far) and my expectations were really high. I like the one server for all players (just instancing busy zones to make it work, and since you can move between instances, and it biases automatically to placing you in instances with people you've previously interacted with) though theres a reasonable chance that very few places will get overcrowded since theres 400,000 systems in the game (though my understanding is that's limited during Beta to force more player interaction)