Steal all you like mister!
Nothing and I mean nothing kills immersion for me than a game that lets you steal everything that isn't nailed down right infront of the people who own it. It only has a place in games that have no immersion to give.
Witcher 3 for example was supposed to be a grand ole time! But I can't even take the game seriously less than an hour in because I can rob the country side completely bare.
What is the point of even playing Witcher 3 if the story is ENTIRELY 100% moot now that the narrative has completely collapsed?
At least with the old RPGs you could hypothesize that the chests were in fact there for you to take... or that you were a stinky thief.
You do get your arse handed to you if you do it in front of guards, soldiers and the like. They beat you up, take some of your money and then you wake up a bit away. No problem if you do it in front of ordinary people (though they sometimes call the guards), but then again they're probably terrified of you as you are a rather towering individual with two rather nasty-looking swords and quite clearly a witcher, a figure that evokes much fear and terror in the eyes of the common folk in the Witcherverse.
So don't worry about your percieved narrative collapse in Witcher 3, turns out that it's on perfectly solid foundations thank you very much. Besides which why would you even want to steal from the common people they have garbage for useful stuff that sells for jack-all. Plus they might sic the guards on you and those guys are nasty.
Reading up on this a bit, some people say it affects quests you might get from those villages, though I've never had that happen to me (though I tended not to steal because people have jack-all in terms of valuable stuff).
Witcher 2 on the other hand had this in droves, where you could take basically whatever you found anywhere.
On a similar note:
Games in which stealing is a capital offense with the immediate consequence of being immediately mobbed to deathSpecifically looking at Bethesda Fallout games here. Chrissake guys, can't you just have a guard come up to me and arrest and fine me? Y'know, just like you did in bloody Skyrim.
Games with disproportionate distribution of wealthY'know, games in which you find hundreds of golden coins in the shacks of poor peasants and the like.