First read then post I also never said that shaders or unimportant, I said shaders are very important. What about combining parallax shaders in outdoor envirmonts with sun and water shader, sphere could not handle that. I also never said that we not want do implement shader technologies. We are really focused to use technologies like normal mapping , parallax, env mapping aso.

These days are really hard for new gameplay elements first every one wants to see are shader technolgies, graphics are always getting better but we forget about the game itself.

Why are you talking about publishers and there expectations ? It seems you missed the " free game" in the beginning.

But lets come back to more then just talking about shaders or not, from the beginning of the development we planned to use shader technologies in the next versions of the game thats a fact.