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Dear Alrik,
I do not only join my voice to yours but go further to explain why RGP is inertially adopting a slash and hack activity for experience points rather than a well balanced role playing.
Cheap cost.
Yes, that is the answer, because designing a role playing game based on true experience is very difficult and costing.
The historical basis of role playing is somehow rooted in Sinbad the sailor’s myth.
Yes, absolutely and I am sure to be correct on this.
Sinbad is supposed to be an adventurer who returns with loot and treasures after facing incredible creatures and telling mind boggling stories of magic enchanted lands to promote his trade.
The stories of Sinbad were so fascinating for so many years that only the Arabian nights came out in parallel until Europe began to tell its own stories and myth.
The ancient Egyptian and Greek myth indeed was there but they had nothing to do with adventure and role playing as much as Sinbad did. The heroics were short stories of war and heroes but not adventure and loot.
Game design with true adventure in mind must consider a detailed story of quests based on tales and rumours about artefacts and treasures that reaches our adventurous hero’s ears. The rewards are great but a creature guards a treasure or a riddle is locking up an artefact in safe keep. While the hero journeys for his quest, he should encounter hints and side quests that aid him in his major quest. This was the original perfect plot of Sinbad and all the similar trend of tales that followed.
Designing riddles and interacting with wizards and owners of articles needed for the quest increases the graphical variety and the voices logarithmically. However, creating a race of Orcs that grunt, and hacking and slashing those green-skinned aliens is much easier to make through building a library and a well defined interaction that repeats and repeats and repeats endlessly.
An ideal RPG would have a world matrix of 5x5 scenes (25 locations), while the player could start at the centre or at a corner to explore this world. A variation of travel by sea, air and land is what Sinbad Stories did consider and that is why a giant bird (Rockh [sp!]) was introduced to carry Sinbad in flight.
This ensures that the story reader does not get bored. Role playing is similar to story reading but with active participation added because we become the hero and we have to solve the riddles and fight his battles, but in a safe environment of simulation.
Your contemplations are perfectly correct of course dear Alrik and it is very weird to have evil creatures in hundreds on your road from point A to point B whenever you move. But it is cheaper to make and easier to implement.
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