Gameplay has nothing to do with the technical details of a product besides beeing limited by them (e.g. no physics engine, no big crater, etc). And they said that they had finished the technical side, e.g. graphics, sound physics implementation. Not that they'd finished the game. And that is a big difference.
For me technical means coding. The graphics, phyiscs and sound is part of the engine for me. It might be he means risen has a completely new engine and they feel this engine is in a good shape technically, and they could ship the engine.
If you made a unreal engine 3 based game, and you used some of the myriad of features in it, you could say the game is technically finished before you even began doing anything, except for licensing UE3 engine.
Besides I do not think combat animation / physics / mechanics could be finished even on a graphical, physical, sound and technical level. If they did not even decide how it would work yet.
Futhermore I think control is an important part of the technical level, it is impossible this part was finished without even knowing which system they are using.
So I guess it might have been we have different ideas of the meaning of what he said: "Technically it is finished and we could ship it today"
You could play through the game all mechanics were done, etc etc, but they want to tweak things like values, add some things to the world or quests, etc etc, not that you have one very important core mechanic of the game which has not even passed through the basic design step of your process yet.