The negative hype from the marketing people is probably my biggest gripe with 4th Edition.
Instead of focusing on cool new concepts that 4e designers had thought up, they led with an attack on 3rd Edition and Forgotten Realms both being "too complicated". I really do hate negative marketing campaigns. It doesn't put me in a happy mood and make me want to buy new stuff if all people can do is run down the competition. But when companies run negative marketing campaigns against their discontinued products, what they are actually doing is telling their older customers that they made a mistake buying their stuff.
This isn't really something new to 4th Edition. It's been going on for several editions of D&D now, but it really does suck.
It looks like they have got rid of most of this negative advertising hype for the 5th Edition era and I couldn't be happier.
Havard wrote:When 4E was announced, WotC stated that they were going to release one new setting per year. Although I am not sure if every setting is suited for 4E, I was disappointed that so few settings appeared. Lisencing out the old settings like in the 3E era would have made me happy.
^ This.
When 4th Edition came out, I waited for them to publish campaign settings that I was interested in.
I didn't expect to see Spelljammer come back as a campaign setting, but if I was going to play Spelljammer, under 4th Edition rules, I would need to have Krynnspace and Greyspace, as well as Realmspace.
The 4th Edition Forgotten Realms timejump made a 4e Realmspace problematic, but not impossible. So I waited. And I waited and waited and waited. And then somebody said 4th Edition was "bad" and they cancelled Nentir Vale just as it started to get interesting and began playtesting D&D Next.
Now that 5th Edition is out, we don't have a "one campaign setting per year" promise. We have more of a "we will get one campaign setting right, before we move on" promise. That seems better, but I'm looking at 5th Edition wondering if it is going to get cancelled before they publish the sort of campaign setting products I want from it.
So I don't think that WotC have repeated this 4e mistake, but I'm not sure that what they are doing is going to be better...yet.
I'm waiting to see what happens. I'm not holding my breath.