- Both games suffer from level being too important syndrome, where you are basically forced into a linear exploration path (on hardest difficulty), because encounters will be too easy, too hard or just right, all within 1 level of each other.
This honestly strikes me as the more endemic issue, because the issues of the previous games - and I think you're lowballing it on very small issues with there being much bigger ones in each of those games in the context of "obviously bad ideas" - because "level being too important"-syndrome isn't really being discussed much, yet you see it more and more in both PnPs and CRPGs, where "leveling" has to "matter" and has to be "felt", which in turn often reduces levels to numbers bloat that throws the entire curve of the game off, and along with it, any degree of verisimilitude that could possibly exist, since even a group of lower-level goons often pose no threat whatsoever to even a single over-leveled character.
Pitchforks should still hurt, dammit, and a whole mob of peasants should still be a threat to a mid-to-high-level character.