RPG's fail for me due to too much so-called "boar killing" and not enough playing out of so called roles. It is very hard to play the role of a paladin or Amazon warrior if you are hovering 20 feet above them and only interact with monsters by clicking on them to hack in their general direction no control of position or any possibility of tactics; it's just not very engaging. I loved the styling, look and feel of Diablo 2 but there was little more to it than building stats with little reliance on player skill, so the main survival technique was get as much stuff as you possibly can to get better equipment.
Sure, other games have rather monotonous item/supplies hunting such as resident evil where in the first one at least there were more monsters than there were bullets to kill them with. But this was used to force the player to be extra careful and have the real likelihood of ending up cornered, out of ammo, out of health and on the run. This made the zombies something to be feared and avoided as there was a very finite amount of ammo in the game, no easy re-spawning enemies dropping stuff and each box of bullets was like finding the holy grail. I loved the exploring as behind each door there may be zombies, or maybe none and may be a key to advance or may be ammo, health or even a COOL NEW WEAPON. IMHO, it perfectly taps into the Hunter-Gatherer instinct by balancing the risk/reward of exploring for keys/puzzle solutions with the prospect of increased health and powers or being confronted by a badass monster.
I can't argue that RPG's aren't popular but in whatever way they are appealing, it is not working with me. Maybe it is the scavenger instinct to mine an environment of every single natural resource picking every berry and killing every buffalo till you are so strong and equipped you can defeat any enemy with overwhelming force of a variety of pummelling attacks and being able to absorb all damage dealt.
