Hey there, I had responded to your post on the Steam forums as well. Going to do a little copy-paste here for those who might have missed it:
This year, the focus is still on more core design decisions like entirely new assets (including level geometry for these upcoming new locations, unique enemy types, generated weapon effects, sound designs, additional itemization, etc) which seems like a slow build-up. But the more core designs that are created means bringing more elements together, faster too. Because everything else stems off of these core design decisions.
Also note, from the Kickstarter update: "To manage expectations, as “the hub” in EVERSPACE 2’s game world, Union will be the largest of our planned star systems. While some will be substantially smaller, each star system will feature a unique look & feel and offer new types of activities."
The release scheduled for the first half of 2022 technically means we could have 6 months of potential development time ahead of us. Obviously we'd like to deliver sooner than later (otherwise we're just losing time and money), so it simply comes down to bringing it all home in 2022 before we push the full release button, which should be a bit easier with the largest systems out of the way before that homestretch.
Additionally, Early access is mostly for testing game systems and designs, not for experiencing the story. In fact, there are already some decent spoilers that have been revealed in the story, and we're over a year out! We don't want to put all the proverbial eggs in one basket; preferably, we'd like the story to be fresh to experience at that v1.0 release.
The bit "we feel you guys" is that a lot of you are still craving more story, even though we're still over a year out. So, we're going to deliver even more of the story to you all, and updated the roadmap accordingly.
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