Actually during the master of orion 3 release it was similar, if not worse
The pictures look like crap and everyone was like OOOHHH MY GAWWD!
and some beta ppl who have signed a nda contract said: if it moves it looks better!
.... of course it did not
Though graphics is not everything I bought the game. Finding out plenty of glitches:
- manual combat AI unfair advantage could fire missiles even when out of range - human played could not do it
- Broken ai, sometimes it was building transports for troops .... using up all resources for transports which were useless...
- broken invasion, I think (if i remember correctly) the AI was unable to invade a planet in certain cases - a game breaker
- broken diplomacy , also here the AI was lacking..
All in all it was not the game many had hoped for. I hope that SH5 will be the exception but what goes on currently it looks like it will be a medicore uboat sim.