This game will launch holiday 2023. You heard it here first.

I hope you're right :)... Oracle vibes would be unbelievably great too.

But I'd still be surprised if there wasnt some sort of hardware reason influencing this delay. New perpheral, upgraded system or planning ahead for a future system. 

Expected, but still making it tougher to wait. I don't think it will be cross-gen unless Switch 2 already launches Holiday 2023 and the game gets delayed all the way until then. But Switch 2 will probably come out in 2024.

Maybe they saw how good elden ring was and decided to beef up the game some more.

They need 5 years for a game which is based on the BOTW engine and assets. That's pretty long.

I think it's more an economical decision. Switch sells better than expected this year and way better than the competition. There's also a lot of Switch software being released this year. So there's no real need for Zelda to push the hardware. Next year could be different.

Maybe also Bayonetta 3 and Mario & Rabbids 2 get delayed to next year. So we have still Nintendo Switch Sports, Splatoon 3, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and Pokémon Scarlet/Violet as the big titles this year. That's enough to keep interest in Switch. I think we should also see another big unannounced title this year.

Had you had any credibility before in this argument, you'd have lost it when you typed "interactive movie marketed as a game" as a descriptive for TLoU:Part II.

I'm actually (finally) playing BotW right now. Got the game in 2017, just starting playing through it a week or so ago.

I don't know what Elden Ring is like but by god BotW is incredible (as everyone else already knows). I'm 50 hours in and I'm still early in the game. So much to see and explore!

And I gotta think the fact that they are taking 5 years for BotW2, and that they are reusing a lot of the map, code, engine, assets, means it is going to be insanely full of content and will blow even the first game out of the water.

Yeah, Elden Ring is really a blast to explore, it reminds me so much of some of the quite old PC RPGs - I wish more developers had the balls to take notes from those older games.

Let's just say Elden Ring is few grades above BotW when it comes to exploration, world design and things to see. But, to be honest, as a Zelda fan I found BotW to be fairly weak, so I'm really hoping that BotW2 would be significantly better.

Well then I'm gonna have to take your opinion on Elden Ring being a few grades above Zelda with a grain a salt, considering you found BotW to be weak while I find it to be incredible and the exploration is just insane - I usually end up spending 2 to 5 hours just exploring between two points of interest in the game that I could travel between in like 15 or so minutes if I just went straight there, and that just keeps happening over and over. It's an absolute delight.

I think all Nintendo needs to do is build on what they created in BotW. Tinker with things they think they can improve, give us plenty more areas to explore different from the first game, but the main thing is just add in a bunch more content (like more enemy types, more enemy points of interest, normal Zelda dungeons, and much more of a story with gameplay plot points).

Considering they are spending five years on the game despite having a huge base to start from thanks to the first game, I gotta figure the sequel is going to have the same incredible exploration as the first but up the content by a lot. Which is saying a lot, considering based on being 50 hours in right now I'm pretty damn sure the first game is gonna take me over 200 hours.

It's ok, that it's delayed. Even without BotW2 releasing this year, it still is one of Nintendo's best years for software ever, and it might be better than 2017 depending on just how well these games turn out.

I also am skeptical about how well BotW2 will turn out. I hope it is at least as good as BotW. I fear that it will be as bad as Windwaker. In reality, it will probably be somewhere in between.