I don’t know if you are right about LucasArts model, but lets’ suppose that for the sake of argument. There are many reasons why the distillation of the essence of adventure games is easily achievable:
(1) First, you don’t need to play other adventure games to get acquainted with a new adventure game, but you need to play other cRPGs, or at least have a notion of what is character building, to get into a cRPG.
(2) The puzzle elements of an adventure game are easily presentable, the use of skills and stats in cRPGs are widespread in a bigger game world; build combinations are not always intuitive, etc.
This explains why adventure game puzzles have a low entry bar, but complex character building is a high entry bar.
I disagree, at least in part.
First, I think you are underestimating the degree to which adventure games presuppose some basic understanding of the genre -- as basic as the idea that you should take items because they can be taken, or that there is a distinction between a "use" and an "examine" button, or that clues might be embedded in unsuccessful usages, etc. I say this from having read a bazillion Primordia player reviews and having watched dozens of Let's Plays of the game. Bear in mind that Primordia is a very retro-looking adventure game without any meaningful marketing, so the players should skew toward the experienced end of the adventure gamer demographic. Among things I observed in non-trivial numbers: (1) players who did not realize they could examine items by right clicking
for the entire length of the game; (2) players who believed the game required you to "write down everything" even though there is an in-game notepad that records every number and piece of information you gather; (3) players who defaulted to using every item on every other item rather than even attempting a solution, and then complained the game had too many items (at most you had like 12 in your inventory); (4) players who couldn't find the options menu, even though it was in the toolbar; (5) players who couldn't find the toolbar; (6) players who couldn't find exits from rooms. I take these to be failures on my part, but the heart of the failure was assuming that the basic toolset of the 90s adventure gamer is still in use.
Basically, adventure games require you to know certain premises (to look carefully for items in every room; to take every item you can; to assume that a locked door implies a necessary key; to assume that the lack of a key implies the use of a nonstandard item; etc.). You can learn those by playing, but you do have to learn them. The fact that modern "adventure games" tend to have inventories that max out at five items, puzzles that go no farther than "use A on B," etc., is both a cause and an effect of this process.
Second, I think you're maybe underestimating the difficulty of good puzzle design (and the skill set that goes to solving good puzzles), since there have basically been at most five or six good puzzles in the past ~20 years. Even the "real" adventure games (like, say, Primordia) aren't remotely comparable to Lucas or Sierra games in terms of the complexity of their puzzles; it's just that to a dilettante adventure players, they more or less fit the form, the same way that the RPGs that annoy you satisfy the dilettante RPG player.
