Can we just open crates and barrels to look inside instead of smashing them all?

This is pretty much the only thing that bugs me so far in SotA, knowing that it's still pre-alpha. I just walk around smashing everything I want to look inside of when it comes to crates and barrels. It's an immersion break when I walk into someone's home or shop and just start smashing things. I feel like Link, and link could really be a **** when it came to smashing people's things.

 

I'm interested to see what happens in multiplayer mode.

Will the crates simply look smashed to you and no one else ? Or will one user be able to smash the crates on a map for everyone.

If it is for everyone, I foresee all the crates on a map being smashed immediately by the first person on the map, leaving a permanent mess in town (at least until the last user leaves the map and it resets).

 

I agree, this is one of the silly things that is taken for granted in the RPG genre nowadays. It's a constant of the genre now.
a container isn't a chest, then most likely it absolutely need to explode in pieces at some point, under the self-righteous might and authority of the protagonist.
Also, the loot inside rarely make sense. Gold pieces, really ? Who would store handfuls of coins in various containers instead of keeping them all in the same place ?

For the little I have seen of Skyrim, the game seems to be doing a nice job in having realistic containers. Jars are opened without outburst of destruction, and the contents of a farmer's barrels are boring as they should be.
The crate on the bridge to Owl's Head contained breads and cheese, which makes sense. I doubt SotA will have any loot logic problem, it is something RG cares for, as he said at some point in the latest hangout. Wolves won't drop swords.

The simple dissapearance of the crate's lid would be solution, letting us peak inside the content and drag what we want. After a while, the lid could pop back up.
But I am glad to see, so far, that not every containers are gump-based (like the chests and bags are). We actually see the content of the crates in 3D, which is good. Several containers are going to work this way it seems, like baskets and fruits bowls, where we drop items inside them using only physics, and not any gump-based interface.