After an entire week filled with rumors about No Man's Sky being delayed from its original June 21 release date we have finally received an official response from Sony, and unfortunately the rumors have been completely true.

In order to ensure that No Man's Sky gets the level of polish it needs to truly impress everybody its release date has been pushed back to August 9 for North America, August 10 for Europe, and August 12 for the UK. One of these days I'm sure I will finally understand why publishers keep doing these silly staggered releases, but until then, here's what Sony had to say about the whole delay:

"However, as we approached our final deadlines, we realized that some key moments needed extra polish to bring them up to our standards. I have had to make the tough choice to delay the game for a few weeks to allow us to deliver something special.

We understand that this news is disappointing. Making this game is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but we are so close now, and we’re prepared to make the tough choices to get it right."

I really do hope No Man's Sky ends up being as good as the marketing campaign wants us to believe, because it doesn't really fill me with confidence given how rarely the developers demonstrate actual minute-to-minute gameplay. I've seen crafting, I've seen exploration, I've seen trading, and I've even seen combat, but it was always a completely scripted scenario that guaranteed something exciting would happen whenever the developer decided to poke a random rock.

Is this something we can expect from the game once we finally get our hands on it? I have no idea, and that is giving me unsettling flashbacks to Spore, another game with a massive but ambiguous advertising campaign. Either way, its pointless to worry about it right now as E3 is just around the corner, and once it finally arrives we will see actual gameplay footage from completely fresh players.