I don't really take what Aonuma said as BOTW2 being further away than we think. I took it as, well we have to say something about it if we are going to announce this prequel/spinoff. I think Spring next year is a very real possibility, holiday more likely though. I sincerely doubt we will have to wait until 2022.

I am wondering though, maybe we will still get a December title. If we don't, I'm honestly okay, like I said in my previous post, this game alone makes the year golden.
But I was thinking about those rumors of the 2D Metroid. They were always paired with Paper Mario and many Mario re-releases (which all came true). Perhaps 2D Metroid is the December game? I wouldn't be surprised at this point if that is the case, but I would be at the same time.

Hmm ...
Not day 1 as this will likely drop in price given a bit of time.
I enjoyed HW on WiiU and put a bunch of hours into it, still didn't come close to 100%.

The real question in my mind is "for those that aren't in the know, will this game be damaging to the mainline series?" BOTW gained many new fans and if some of these new fans pick this game up expecting a similar experience to BOTW will it make them pass on BOTW2 when they encounter an experience so far removed from BOTW? I mean we know what to expect but I can see some of the new players feeling ripped off with this purchase... What do you guys think?

Tecmo Koei have become a very useful partner to Nintendo's in recent years.
Hyrule Warriors, Fatal Frame 5, Fire Emblem Warriors, Three Houses, now this.

Yea same, with Age of Calamity i don't mind if it releases end of next year now. And yea Botw took longer but with the engine and story established it would be weird if they had issues in the development or get delayed 3 years lmao. I do think they are working hard to surpass the first game and make it fresh. With the prequel now, i'm just sure something will happen to the overworld or story that will be drastically different. They wouldn't push to make a prequel with the champions in hyrule if the sequel was going to stay in the same ground and release like a year after that. So this is exciting to me. Hopefully a big change in atmosphere.

Maybe they will buy them eventually. I'm sure TK were happy as hell when Aonuma reached out with this Age of Calamity idea. They will make so much money out of it.

I kinda doubt they'll buy them, but they've definitely got a mutually beneficial arrangement going. They also let Namco Bandai work on the last two Smash games, Pokken Tournament, and New Pokemon Snap. It's good to see Nintendo working well with third parties.

So, the holiday game is a musou, that's usually niche. Well, it will be the best sold ever musou game. Interesting to see.
It would also help to move botw and vice versa, specially for new owners.
It will interesting to see.

I don't think there's much danger of that.

It's not like it's called "The Legend of Zelda: Age of Calamity", the title clearly indicates it's a spinoff.

This will probably go on to be the best-selling Koei Tecmo developed game ever. I think Nioh at 2,9 mil is the current record holder?
Judging by how the trailer has been recieved and BotW being as huge as it is, this should beat those numbers with ease.

If 2.9 million is how much Nioh sold, then I'm pretty sure Three Houses has passed it at this point. It shipped an additional 290k in the January-March quarter which brought its total to 2.87 million. I'm pretty sure it's over 3 million by now.

Either way, I too believe that AoC will break the current record with relative ease.