Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-27384850-20171001033940/@comment-28251580-20171013040059

Don't rely on hearsay. Asuna has her parts during the first part too. But Alicization is longer than the entire anime up to now (S1,EE,S2,maybe even with Ordinal Scale), so obviously, a ton of new characters will appear and get a lot of screentime for development this time.

But yes, the majority of the old cast won't have much screentime until the second part of Alicization.