Fire surfaces do not change a story, the story existed regardless on if I can throw fire on the ground or not.
The world not being massive enough in a video game to represent real distances is not something new and through careful generation of "scripted spaces" you can make a small place "feel" big (actually sat in on a class about this talking about how Vegas uses long winding paths and limited sight lines to make tourists stay longer and lose track of time as they guide them through gambling lobbies before they can get to food or hotel rooms in order to control behavior of the people and manipulate them).
Fast travel is a quality of life addition that many games use now because rewalking through dead space that has already been explored becomes tedious to the average gamer (some people like that, but good game design recycles as little content as possible in order to keep the player engaged. If content is recycled it has to be done with a purpose, otherwise you are synthetically lengthening the player experience and possibly causing tedium).
Jumping, throwing and carrying heavy objects are "fun" mechanics introduced to make the world more interactable so it feels less static. Depending on your strict aderance to "reality" and "video game" you may be able to have a suspension of belief and just enjoy it, or you can be the guy in the movie theater going "THAT ISN"T REAL! No way do cars work that way, or guns can't shoot that much, or you can't get down a stairwell before a bomb goes off that fast!"
Basically, because video gaming in general has introduced too many new mechanics, it is adverse to your concept of how a game should be played.
It's like kids playing tag, but now they are playing with light sensor guns and it is called lazer tag, but you are just sitting there thinking "that isn't tag, real tag you have to run up and touch the person, you can't just tag them out from a distance like that, it isn't fun and it isn't fair".
Actually fire surfaces change the story if you consider the story as an entire experience, just as I explained.
Combats are a part of your journey and stick to the rules would lead to more consistent combat
World being inconsistent because it's impossible to have "real distance" => don't make me laugh... BG1 did it pretty wel 20 years ago
Fast travel, laughing again... => BG1 did it pretty well 20 years ago. Creating something more 2020 doesn't mean ridiculous TP.
Jumping, throwing and carrying are fun, I agree. But it actually breaks their gameplay and combats looks visualy and tactically ridiculous.
I guess you're trying to push it to the "nostalgia" thing because your imagination about what it could looks like is pretty limited.
