I think this last round of news really challenges my status as a card-carrying 4e Agnostic.
Although Umbran is right to note that we are trying to evaluate things without proper context -- and, as with 3e, we should be taking every bit of news with a heaping sack of salt -- on the other hand, we really aren't in the same situation as we were back when 3e was coming.
2e, at the end of its reign, was broken and bloated, hauling around the weight of hundreds of supplements. In 1999 there were several competing game engines on the market that were mechanically stronger than 2e. TSR had gone dark for months. The situation was dire.
Right now, people have begun to see the limitations of 3e. I certainly think it's high time for a revision. Most of the problems with the system that have been pointed out by WotC designers and good citizens on this board -- excessive prep time, too much complexity for DMs, high level play, monster design -- are real issues. And there are a ton of supplements that have brought important new ideas to the system that should be incorporated into the core.
But the current situation could not in any way be described as dire. The need for a 4e right now isn't anywhere near as great as was the need for 3e in 1999. Yeah, those problems with 3e that I mentioned above are real, but they are not pervasive and they don't cripple the game. Many of them are corner cases that a DM would only run into if they, like MerricB, ran three sessions every week or only ran high level games or if they were a professional game designer.
For most people, 3e works just fine, most of the time. It's a fundamentally strong game engine. A revision that pulled the best ideas from the supplements into the core and cleaned up some of the worst problems would probably be welcomed with open arms by the vast majority of people on this board. I'd be in the front row throwing flowers.
But my problem is that, other than the broad, high level goals described by the design team, I am finding myself hating almost every single specific change I am hearing about, from the risible names to the total revision of the magic system into something probably very neat but also unrecognizable. When news of 3e was leaking out, there were plenty of things that sounded terrible along with things that sounded brilliant. I was probably 60% positive and 40% negative when they launched, and ended up loving 3e. Right now I am probably 80% negative and 20% positive, and that positive rank seems to be dropping lower every day.
(Topic for another thread:
Is WotC Running a Disastrously Bad Marketing Campaign for 4e? Maybe we can't evaluate the system yet, but we sure as heck can talk about how the information has and hasn't been disseminated.)
To me, the changes that are being described sound way too severe for my taste. I feel like 3e needs a tune-up, not the major overhaul that is being described. I appreciate that the designers want to be bold and make deep changes to the engine. But I suspect they will fix some stuff but will also create many new problems that do not currently exist. So the game will go three steps forward and two steps back. It's not my lack of faith in their ability as designers; it's just the nature of something so complex. It took years of widespread play for many of 3e's weaknesses to be exposed and understood; I'm not sure that WotC's limited playtest pool is going to flush out those sorts of issues.
Whereas at this point, we have an unprecedented understanding of the 3e engine. Probably no RPG system has had more development and discussion than 3e. The 4e designers could have built on that knowledge base and done a spectacular tune-up. Instead, they are shooting for the moon with a radically new engine. While I certainly hope that this gamble pays off, the more radical the changes, the chances for a sweeping success diminish.
Finally, while I don't really give a crap about in-game canon, I do like that there has been a certain amount of continuity between editions. I did a revision last year of a WD module from 1980 (
http://home.gwi.net/~rdorman/frilond/rul/dm/Tizun_Thane.html). And while there was plenty of stuff that didn't translate (and no worries, thought I), I was very pleased to find that the end product very much felt like the original. Based on what I'm reading, I don't think I could perform a similar feat for 4e.