By the way, does anyone else think Pokemon Legends Arceus was originally intended to come out THIS year for the Pokemon 25th celebration events (possibly explaining the lazy state of Sword/Shield), but has been delayed until early next year due to the impacts of COVID on GameFreak/Japan etc?
The way everything is going, it kinda feels like Pokemon Snap, Unite, the Pearl/Diamond Remake AND Arceus Legends were all meant to land this year as part of the big year of celebrations; but with the situation its got pushed back for more development time as it's just no where near ready yet; which could be seen as much by the early tech demo they showed. The release date of 'Early 2022' so close after the Pearl/Diamond remake makes me think this was the initial plan, and then things got jiggered around by the impact of COVID on game development and involved studios.
Pearl/Diamond has already been farmed out to Ilca to free up manpower at Gamefreak, Pokemon Snap to Bandai, Pokemon Unite to Timi, and Crown Tundra for Pokemon Sword/Shield released October last year; meaning that theoretically it'll be well over a year, probably year and a half plus of dev time since we saw anything major out of Gamefreak.
Given we know Gamefreak run a smaller team than most studios making AAA (or meant to be AAA) games, it just seems very logical to me; end of the year/Holiday Season of the Pokemon 25th would have made a LOT of sense to roll out a big new Pokemon game that at least gives an initial appears of trying to move the series forward somewhat/showing a LITTLE ambition to be more like the open world game Pokemon fans have been hoping for for years. Fingers crossed they allow the needed time, and bring/have brought in more staff to do this properly.
I genuinely wonder how long they've been working on this game though!