copy/pasted from another thread I posted this in:

It doesn't have atmospheric landing (yet), but it does have moon-buggy landing on "dead" planets. They look incredible, though. Must more lifelike than how NMS handles it: https://imgur.com/Ekxmu9f. They also feature different gravity, different mineral resources, and the potential to find loot and information from wrecked ships and abandoned planetary stations and depots (NOTE: you need the Horizons expansion for all the planetary stuff)

The universe in E:D is a 1:1 recreation of the milky way, which means it has 400 billion star systems, complete with binary/trinary systems, gas giants, rogue planets, dead stars, and ringed planets where you can actually fly into the rings. Everything follows physics, too, so you can literally fly into the sun and everything orbits it's central star(s). All space stations and outposts also orbit their own planets in each system, so flying vast distances can feel like what some E:D players call "Euro Truck Simulator on steroids".

There are currently 29 different ships with still more being planned and introduced, and they all get added to the base game without the need to buy any DLC. Ships have different manufacturers, classes, and functions too: https://www.elitedangerous.com/en/features/shipyard

You can be a trader, a space pirate, an imperial guard, a mercenary, an explorer (there are plenty of systems that haven't been discovered), a salvager, a space trucker, a tourguide (planned in next update), or just a player ganker if that's your style. It has solo and multiplayer modes, and the multiplayer mode does actually work very well. The caveats would be that wherease NMS is a walking simulator, Elite: Dangerous is a spaceflight simulator. So, at the moment you can only romp around either in your spaceship or in an SRV on planetary surfaces. They have, since the beginning, meant to include atmospheric planetary landing, gas giant atmospheric flight, and first person mechanics including walking around stations and ship-to-ship boarding, so they're in the works as the game is being constantly expanded upon.

The game is being developed by Frontier, headed by David Braben, who created the original Elite back in 1984 and essentially invented the open-world 3D space sim, then went on to make a few very well-received sequels that included some of the features mentioned above, as well as helping create the Raspberry pi, so if there's a dev to be trusted to make a good space sim it would be him.

There's a steep learning curve initially to E:D if you decide to give it a try. Landing is the polar opposite of NMS; you need to request docking, manually fly through the "mail slot", find your landing pad, and do all the maneuvering yourself, but I find it personally to be a much more rewarding experience. Pissing off a faction can lead to you not being welcome in a multitude of systems, and some players can be real assholes (but if you know which systems to avoid you're mostly ok. Play solo and no problem).

I liked NMS, for what it's worth, even put in over 50 hours on PS4; but I'm a weirdo who was raised on space sims so it wore on me pretty quickly and I just slinked back to E:D to be a real space explorer.