You'd think so but you'd also have expected to see it by now too. Higuchi taking time from Smash to help oversee Vesperia R makes me suspect more emphasis might be placed on this title than the usual Tales port/remaster.
I take the lack of the next tales game as them putting more effort into the game. call it wishful thinking, but I think they want the next game to be more impactful for the series.
Had an unchecked notification for this thread so I figure I should mention that if it's releasing in 2019/early 2020, then the current situation is actually pretty typical. The games have been using an alternating pattern of a three year project with a 1-2 year follow-up project for years now, Vesperia was the end of an era in more ways than one as the last relatively fresh console game that was made "quickly" (~2 years, 2006 to 2008):
Graces: 2006 -> 2009
Graces f: 2009 -> 2010
Xillia: 2008 -> 2011
Xillia 2: 2011 -> 2012
Zestiria: 2011 -> (early) 2015
Berseria: 2014 -> 2016
Next: 2016 -> 2019/early 2020
The games, the bigger ones anyway, aren't being made more cheaply, more quickly, or with smaller staff sizes than Vesperia was. If anything the argument should be that they've been trying to take budgets at or not too much higher than Vesperia's, and stretch them to make larger, more complex games where Vesperia's approximate budget isn't sufficient. The silence is mainly because we're just on the three year phase of the pattern and they don't have 2-3 teams making games concurrently anymore, so the gaps of nothing between new games are going to be longer now. I doubt it's about development hell, using ports as tests, or really even them taking more time than usual. I wouldn't be surprised if they've been researching, organizing, and training for a next gen project since finishing Zestiria in 2015, but the "main" development time will probably end up being the usual 3 years.
