I can appreciate your perspective that it's nothing but MP right now. We're just super hyped how well it turned out, and you're reading our enthusiasm over it, and of course remember it did not exist until very recently so needs a LOT of testing before the Steam Early Access launch. Also bear in mind MP sits on top of the single player engine (as without it there would be no MP) so single player gets stability tested each and every time.
As to features such as swimming, day and night, weather, inventory system and other cool ideas, we felt it best to focus on performance and stability over adding anything new prior to the Early Access build, and I think the majority agreed stability of the software should take precedence over any specific feature request. Rest assured that all the above features WILL be in the product this year as part of our Early Access development work. Not only that, we are going to tackle each one as a whole project, so we design out the full extent of the feature, code and test it, and release it as a stable ready-to-go module onto Steam. Although it's true we could bash out the features quite quickly, we want to do a good job on each one so swimming would also be accompanied by any other water issues that might arise in game such as what enemies do when they enter the water, does ammo float, what kind of underwater shader techniques should we employ, do we add underwater vegetation assets, can you fire your HUD weapon underwater, do you want the control the speed of movement via sliders and a thousand other little questions which will need answers. As you can imagine, it's best to tackle this with a clean brain and a singular focus, and we best accomplish that by first emptying our plate of other distractions (like a Steam launch).
You might also the question the wisdom of a Steam launch, opting instead to complete ALL POSSIBLE features before release, but we wanted to take advantage of the benefits of the Early Access feature of Steam which allows the wider Steam community to participate in the direction of the development, which may lead to a specific feature improvements we might not have made behind closed doors.
Speaking to our road map, I can reveal that once we're on Early Access, the first big module to be released is Character Creator (which scored the highest in our old voting system) and that will be development from mid-March with a possible release in April (if all goes well). At the same time Ravey, our multi-player coder, will be in very close communication with the MP community on Steam, to make sure we have done everything right and there are no glaring omission in what we're doing. After Character Creator is released, we have penciled in work on the Construction Kit, but by then we might have received a lot of feedback from the Steam community on what the priority should be. Maybe that priority would be water and swimming features, but will not know until the product is out there and the feedback starts coming in. What I can promise is that from April I will be back on coding single player features, one after the other, releasing them one at a time on Steam all the way through to the end of 2015. I would be VERY surprised if we did not have swimming, water, day/night, inventory, RPG mechanisms, LUA commands for third person control, customizable HUDs, new weapon styles, lifts, moving platforms and a host of additional AI behaviors by then but as with any software development, certainty is a rare commodity.
PC SPECS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, Intel Core i7 920 (PASSMARK:5008), NVIDIA Geforce 9600 GT GPU (PASSMARK:752) , 6GB RAM
