We shouldn't stand for it anymore! :)

[A Black Falcon]

Well once in a warehouse there were like a LOT of crates, but for what reason can they come up with for you to be in a warehouse?

As far as "do I HAVE to blow the thing up?" that is a great question!

I think one game has really brought that point forward more than most, at least for me. (etc)

Why can't a game for once just have me open the boxes... okay, KotOR did. But it compensated by having extreme repetition... walk over, hit button, watch the animation for that box (and there are like three kinds so you see each one a lot), etc... but I do prefer it to the alternative of blowing them up like usual.

I mean really, when faced with a room full of boxes... normal people would either ignore them or open them. Blowing them all up is just stupid... in the real world, such actions would probably be too likely to harm the contents of the crate, after all. :)

... oh, and isn't it great when crates not just break, but explode? Yeah... that makes sense...

In Zelda, for example, about midway through the game Link is strong enough to hurl around 50 ton bolders and literally smash them against a nearby wall. He's strong enough to cut a giant beast to ribbons, and powerful enough to run INTO a wall and break it down. Why then does he have to find a key to open a wooden door just because it's locked? I could go on and talk about how his sword of the ancients that is sharpened to a quark's edge is deflected by TREES but I won't because I understand the myriad of glitches that would have to be dealt with if total environmental destruction was designed into it (and from experience I can tell you that IS very doable on current hardware, VERY, it's just that it is VERY easy to get a character stuck beyond all reason and glitch up pretty much everything, and also there's the RAM that has to keep track of all that). Instead I'll just focus on stuff like that. If I'm wearing mitts that give me the strength of a titan and just RIPPED the STONE entrance to the thief's den off a statue, don't tell me I can't just break down that wooden door on my own. I'll take deus ex-planations aplenty mind you, like "the door is magical" or "the door is actually a force field", but not that stuff.

Actually, it's nota good idea to try to cut down trees with swords, it dulls the blade quickly and isn't very effective... no, the problem with trees is different: in real life, you can walk between them. :D

Of course, with all of the issues you mentioned, there are very simple explanations... namely, that you need to have puzzles to solve, and that they can't build everything or account for every possibility. What fun would it be if you could just blast through everything in a Zelda game, ignoring most of the puzzles? Yeah, not as much... I think the 3d Zeldas actually do a good job of this, with bars appearing on the doors when it locks you in, being able to go over fences, etc... they've got improbably placed walls, and tree-walls for forests, but as I said, that's simply a reflection of the fact that you cannot expect anyone to build an entire planet. You can only do so much level design, especially if you want it good, and for a game that has a puzzle as well as an action element you need SOMETHING to keep people from just running around your puzzles... so you end up with unrealistic, and sometimes unsatisfying, elements that are annoying but have great explanations for their existance... and would be very, very hard to change. I mean really, it'd be much harder to come up with realistic reasons for forcing you to follow the path the game wants to follow than it is to just drop in invisible walls or uncrossable fences!

Pen and paper RPGs have this solved, of course, because there's a live DM to try to steer things in an appropriate direction. No programming can match a live person. So instead, the only option we've got is restrictions... it's impossible to make a computer or console RPG with the depth of choices of the pen and paper games (this might not be true forever, but it sure is now...), so you need to accept some level of unrealism. It's annoying at times for sure, but there's just no way for, say, a D&D game to allow Dimension Door (very nice teleport spell...) and still have much in the way of puzzles or preset encounters... and without a human DM to compensate, the game is doomed.