Guild Wars 2

I was always, and always will be, an advocate for horizontal progression, gaining skills and abilities versus straight up number gains on stats.

I don’t know how ANet did it, but they seem to have taken away a lot of the horizontal progression by rationing it even more severely than before.

This really makes it difficult to custom shape your character on a specialty early in the game. Instead, the professions are now even more generic than ever before. No self determination until 30 levels into the game and then only in a grudgingly small way.

GW2 is already a very “dry” game; the further extended intervals between gaining new traits as well as the other built-in level based restrictions has pretty much reduced the driving aim of the game down to the rather dull “gain as many levels as fast as possible in order to get to the good stuff”.