It shouldn't be about whether it's "indie" or not. "Indie" really just means it was made by a developer that isn't owned by a large publisher. What people should really be looking at is the size of the development team, the man hours involved, and probably the quality of the art assets in the game. That last part is probably one of the most expensive parts of game development.
One of the main reasons The Order: 1886 is $60 despite being so short is likely because of all the work that went into the engine, textures, character models, cut scenes, voice acting, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the gameplay systems were a much less expensive aspect of making the game.
On the flipside, we have indie games with concepts and mechanics that are probably a lot more complex and wander into much more uncharted territory, but the art and graphics in a lot of those games looks dirt cheap. Of course there are AAA-asset games that have extremely complex systems going on like GTA or MGSV. I would still say however that GTA V is a $250 million game not strictly because of how big it is, but because of all the detail Rockstar crammed into every nook and cranny of that huge-ass world.
NMS looks like it has some extremely complex things going on under the hood: gravity, the behavior of stars determining what planets will be like, economies running between stations and star systems, all procedurally generated. And of course it's all effectively infinite. But NMS is still a game being put together by around a dozen people, and its art assets do not look extremely detailed at all, not compared to other $60 games.
I guess another factor you might have to look at is the location of the development team. The Witcher 3 is a massive game but was apparently made for like $60 million (I for get if it wasn't like 80 or something) because it was made in Poland. A while ago someone made a comparison between Broken Age and a similar indie adventure game that appeared to have a lot more content but was made for less money, and the reason for that comparison is because Broken Age was developed in San Francisco. Higher cost of living means higher cost of man hours. All that probably doesn't affect the price of a game too much, but it does affect how much the game needs to sell to break even. I'm not sure how that works out in London where NMS is being made.
Edit: GTA V could afford to have $250 million pumped into it because everybody knew the game was going to immediately sell like 20 million copies at $60. The game made a billion dollars in three days. Successes like that are rare in video games, so it had a lot more leeway in what it could do compared to almost everything else in the console space.
