D&D 4e yet again
D&D 4th edition is something which WotC's marketing department is trying to present as a radical departure from previous editions; from what we've seen so far, this may not be as far removed from the truth as a lot of marketing hype - it does seem like the designers started with an idea of what they wanted the game to be like, and took the elements of previous editions of D&D which fitted with that model, but dropped the ones which didn't, even if they were the "core mechanics", most notably Vancian spellcasting (having a fixed number of spells per day).

Now, I like the feel a lot of the metadesign which has gone into the game which I think can be summed up by the sentiment expressed in the multiclassing preview that there shouldn't be "bad choices hidden in the rules". There's obviously an implementation issue of getting that right in a system with the complexity of D&D, but that's "just" a matter of playtesting. However, the thing I'm not necessarily liking the feel of (and this is something which I haven't seen explicitly expressed anywhere, but something I think I'm picking up) is the move towards a less narrative style of game; D&D has always been on the edge of what I like on the scale of "abstracted mechanics for the sake of making a good game", and it seems to me that 4e is moving further in that direction, if nothing else because there's no other way to get the designer's desired "balance" between all the classes. Of course, another reason for this could be that it's easy to preview the game mechanics, but much more difficult to preview the fluff, so we're getting an unbalanced view of what 4e will be like.

(Partially inspired by this debate over at Critical Hits, but something I've been meaning to post for a while anyway)