The game is too big. They need to condense the map into 1/10 of the current size. Even then its still huge.
Ive no problem was grand scope and ambition but realistically how many years until Myrland is budding full of ripe content?
Reducing Size would actually make things harder on current computers and really mess with server stability. For example if you ever played Ark Survival Evolved, whenever you see a persons base that has a lot of different things the game starts lagging terribly. They would need to re-adjust all the tuning they have done so far and that would be a waste of the development power.
A Faster more efficient way is to start filling up the map we currently got. They can take all the assets from MO1 and implement them into Mo2, they can tweak and tune the damage and hp of the monsters for Mo2 and change some of the designs and it wouldn't be a lot of work to do that. Unreal Engine4 is really good at making development and design a much easier process. I can make some really good things myself in just a few hours. For example if you make a tree you can resize that tree and place it on the map and make a entire forest out of 1 really well made tree in about a hours time. You can then do the same for monsters and re-doing their damage values and stats is even easier then that.
I am actually shocked they want to release this game in October, as it is, there is so much work to be done before this is a game ready for launch. I mean wtf are they thinking.
To Answer your question: Their pacing with MO1 it took them years to start releasing things in the game. In fact for the longest time MO1 had no updates, and then we started to get them like Necromancy, The New Armor, Sarducca Continent, and Elementalism were like the final things they added into mortal before it died. So the idea's they currently have could take 1-2 years to put into the game, and that is if they step their game up and try harder this time around. But they have 30 devs is what someone said, so realistically they could do all of those things in like a 6 month time period. They seem to release Content 1 month at a time, with 3 months of planned development at a time. I am interested to see what will be on the Roadmap for October Onwards to see what the next 3 months will give us.