Welp, Steam's said August 12th for me this whole time so I was expecting as much, but it's a shame when things like this happen.
As for the numb feeling of drought, it's something I've been experiencing from time to time for almost a couple of decades now, and it's very specific to the genre NMS belongs to and tries to expand and perfect. There's a few times a year when I just really, really want to play a space exploration and trading game, anything resembling the genre really, but always, always feeling painfully disappointed, something always lacking in the small number of games actually existing in the genre. There have always been elements that were sorely underdeveloped or lacking, or too complex (for dumb ol' me) in these games that just made me not be able to play them for longer stretches of time. It's either the combat is really bad, archaic or very non-immersive (top-down janky shooter encounters in a 4X game do nothing for me), or there's a whole tedious (some would say engaging and fun) grinding trading system requiring to memorize and basically "work", sucking out the joy, and since a lot of them were made a long time ago, and it's all basically a broader niche genre, there's a lot of archaic feeling systems in there, in the sense of dead ends, extremely tedious levels of trial and error (as in going through a large portion of the game, realizing you've made some terrible mistakes, and now the realtime clock has gone and that alien you needed greet with "Me like female ondoyante, laugh laugh" with cryptic broken symbols is no longer there, so better restart) and straight up broken mechanics.
To me, it's always felt like I've played Wolfenstein 3D and being amazed at this new thing, dreaming of the possibilities of the genre, and then waiting 20 years for someone to create Doom. It's not the best analogy, since space sims have a bit of a pedigree, there's been some wonderful stuff over the years, but the dream of the seamless universe has never quite been realized before.
NMS is a game in a genre with that kind of legacy in it, full of promise, cool ideas (and sometimes it does deliver) but always with a lot of jank and rough edges. So what Hello Games are doing is not just reinventing the genre, reshaping it in a contemporary way, they're finally expanding it to new technical heights, so it's no wonder there are (and possibly still will be) bugs, visual issues, pop-in and all sorts of problems.
I genuinely think that NMS, as a concept, is a really, painstakingly hard thing to make. In a way, it reminds me of stuff like Mount & Blade or EDF, games that look pretty bad, at least a generation behind, are full of issues but then they offer awesome things that no other game does, simply because they're smaller budget, "indie" things that are specifically built to make that one dream come true (fighting alongside an army of medieval swordsmen with a satisfying melee system, or killing hundreds of giant insects, massive city destroying spaceships and kaiju with just stupid fun weapons). It's one of those things you have conversations with your buddies about, how awesome it would be to do, yet nobody makes it. Until someone does.
I've been doing the same and I know that it won't ship until Monday like all my pre-orders have done.
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