No Man’s Sky is now barely a week away, and the August 9 release is easily the most anticipated game of the year. The hype is sky-high, as are expectations for the galactic exploration title. And the game does sound truly ground-breaking and exciting. But prepare yourselves now: There’s going to be some disappointment when the game first comes out. From you, from us, from all the media. But don’t make too much of it: that’s just a matter of right-sizing expectations.

No Man’s Sky Hype: The Reality Is Different Than The Hype

Any game that has an incredible amount of hype behind it comes out to a certain amount of disappointment. Fallout 4 is the most obvious recent example, but there have been many others. As pointed out on Rock Paper Shotgun, the versions of these games that lives in our imaginations is always just a little shinier, just a little more impressive, just a little more feature-rich than the version that ends up in existing in reality. Hype leads us to dream for fantastic things—and No Man’s Sky has been hyped like few games before.

Thankfully, from everything we’ve seen so far, No Man’s Sky truly is impressive. It’s not the total Minecraft-style sandbox some might hope for—there’s no base-building, for instance—but it really does offer quite a variety of things to do. It’s a combined space exploration / space capitalist / space combat / space survival simulation, and there will be plenty to do and huge amounts to discover.

But inevitably it will disappoint at first. It won’t feel quite the way you imagine it to feel in your hands—it’ll be a little slower, take a little longer to find beautiful vistas, a little less diverse, or something along those lines. In short, it won’t be perfect. And the press will nail the game for it. No Man’s Sky isn’t going to be judged on its own merits—it will be judged against the marketing campaign for No Man’s Sky.

But don’t let that stop you. Over time, assuming the game is as good as it looks—as it actually looks, not as we imagine it to be—our expectations will fall in line with its reality, just like they do with every game. Fallout 4 wasn’t perfect, but it had lots of fun stuff to do, despite its problems. No Man’s Sky may not meet all of the hype—but it will still dazzle us with wonder.