We're trying to do one release, and it may not have the breadth of magical effects, but it has point A to point Z with creation myths, which we already have a generator for that's pretty varied, and then magic systems, and magical objects.
[..]
Yeah. Release, and kind of decide: do we do another three or four month essentially expansion pack of that, or do we do the law/property/custom thing and switch? And then it just goes back into the category of everything else in the game. Stuff is slowly added to everything, but it's not a concerted push anymore.
But I have a feeling that the concerted push on magic could last a few releases. Especially if it works really well, we'll be interested in doing three or four more pushes on it. So if the whole process lasts two or three years, I wouldn't be surprised. And I'd hope to have more than one release in that 2-3 year window, to keep it interesting and keep people realizing the potential once they see the potential is there. Then we can do more.
Source
So it might be 1-2 years: creation myths as part of worldgen and some low-hanging fruit, then two more years of getting stuff added. How disappointed will you be?
Yeah, it was a joke, I'm not expecting more than 2 years.
However, you should note that things have changed since that article. Notably the map rewrite ("that adds another 6 months to the schedule") and the sudden change to the usual routine to throw in a huge bunch of extras to make sure we have a fun, robust game to play with during the "years" of the Big Wait.
So, I'm thinking, if all this pre-Big Wait stuff is good enough, Toady's going to be happy with going a full two years without a release (besides fixing fatal crash bugs, which he promised to do this time around). Guess we should also allow for time off to escape oppressive heat, plus worldwide lectures which are both extras that previous Waits didn't have.
(Although last fotf, he was back to "if the map rewrite goes ahead". That would be kind of disappointing if it didn't.).