I've drafted up a bunch of ideas I had about various things that could be added to the game without (hopefully) going against the game design principles RARE is employing.
World Building:
Let ppl find books with snippets of lore, including stuff other pirates have done near that location
Let ppl find pages of these lore books to collect
Include in these pages/books tales of environmental challenges
Add npc’s that grant you quests. Maybe they can tell you about an unexplored and uncharted island with treasure or a skeleton bounty on it. Maybe they offer you challenges to finish some voyages within some given time frame. Maybe they want you to collect a full set of lore book pages about an adventurer they like. Maybe they send you out looking for trinkets they lost near a given island. Maybe they only offer cryptic riddles that the player has to decipher before realizing it’s a quest.
Add gurus that can teach the player cool button combos/moves for combat areas like fist fights, melee weapons, and firearms. Note that these would not be ‘unlocked’ moves/combos, but just ones that everyone has access to if they happen to hit the right button combo but these gurus in the world could teach you how to do them. That way they are still rewarding you with something akin to small vertical progression without actually gating off other players from it.
Swordplay:
Quicker animation to perform blocking so it is more instant. Doing this might make more ppl use it, which in turn might make them understand why there is a delay in the swiping animation.
More melee weapons like knives, various swords, axes, etc.
Add button combo flourishes and timed counter attacks.
Gunplay:
For sniping, add a musical note when ya hit someone akin to how it works on the cannonballs hitting a ship. This ups the feedback to the player in a neat way beyond just the cross hair thing that shows up briefly.
Add a cross bow, bow and arrow?
Add ability to carry pouches of ammo with you.
Add throwing knives.
Treasure Quests:
To add flavor to these, maybe on higher level maps there is no X marked, or just some are marked but not others. To see all of the marks, maybe ya have to submerge the map below salt water, or below fresh water, or maybe ya have to hold them up to the sun/moonlight. Ya could use a torch or nearby candle flame to heat up the maps too, which in turn might reveal stuff.
Maybe for some, make the player have to do an environmental puzzle first to get to a certain spot that is otherwise unreachable, then dig there.
Add more cursed chests. Maybe one that has storms follow you, or one that attracts the Kraken to your ship making ya outrun it, or one that puts a bounty on your crew, or one that constantly adjusts your field of view to make depth perception wonky, or one that blurs your vision, or one that attracts lightning to strike the chest, or one whose worth diminishes the longer ya go without playing it music, or one that attracts tons of sharks to your ship, etc.
Riddle Quests:
It’d be neat to let the community submit riddles to mix things up a bit. Also, have higher level riddles not tell you what island to start on, but instead make that step a riddle itself. Also, maybe have riddles require you to open up a buried box to find a key, which has the next step to the riddle inside of it.
Other riddles could dovetail with the puzzles on certain islands, suggesting to you how to complete them. Maybe have certain caves that distort compass readings too, making it tougher to known where to dig. Also, let us dig up graves to find a chest maybe. The riddle could be about the player figuring out which grave to dig up and include elements of backstory to the person who was buried there.
Islands:
Scatter lore pages around the islands that tell the tales of pirate adventures or allude to some cryptic riddles about puzzles on certain islands.
Add more messages in bottles, but also have some of them be lore pages or other world building stuff.
Add more trinkets scattered around the shores. Add more treasure chest to the shores and the island in general too.
Incorporate environmental puzzles into the islands.
Ships:
Include a row boat that requires rowing in sync to work well
Add harpoons to be built into some ships that can be used to tow other ships. The other crew getting harpooned should be able to cut the rope or otherwise dislodge the harpoon.
Add a diving bell
Add a rendered anchor
Add ability to light sails on fire and to repair them.
Taverns:
In taverns specifically, it’d be cool to make these a social space where you can play cards/dice or compete in bare knuckle fight clubs.
Maybe even let your crew place bets on who will win. Maybe something similar could be done for sword/knife fighting to the death.
Maybe some sort of knife throwing game? Or somehow implement that knife stabbing between fingers on the table game?
Also, hire some shanty singers to go on tour through the outposts where they show up and sing shanties in the pub for a few hours.
Oh, and maybe have drinking contests where ya perform certain tasks while drunk.
On the cards in the game, presuming they show up in-game at some point, make the face of the cards include images of pirates who have done something cool that week or who are doing great on that server in the current play session.
Shops:
It might be cool world building to have some shop keepers tell you they don’t have certain special items and that you could either order it and wait a few days to get it, or, ya could alternatively go get the item from another named shop on some other island. Maybe even going to those other shops and hauling back some inventory could be neat as a side quest for these shops.
Trading Companies:
Someone selling secret bounties placed on other pirates in the server would be cool
A trading company dedicated to hunting monsters like the Kraken, Moby D**k, Nessy, Sea Serpents, a huge Boar, an Anaconda, a giant man-eating bird, Mermaid Queen, Ghosts, giant spider, etc. You’d have to go to specific islands/sunken ships and find ways to summon the beasts. Imagine having to use your mic/Kinect to actually let out a bellow to summon a giant whale. It’d be hilarious! These beasts would require co-op teamwork to take down, like having someone play a sad tune to lower the defenses of the Mermaid Queen, or raising their lantern to lower the defenses of the Ghost, or lighting an area on fire to guide the anaconda to a certain spot to corner it, or play bagpipes to attract Nessy.
Have the npc’s in the game use spoken lines of dialogue.
Maybe have a cartographer’s trading company where you go out to explore various islands and mark places of interest or other neat features of the island.
For merchant quests, let us buy crates at any point to stockpile animals if we want to. Also, it’d be cool to let players do something (not sure what) to establish trade routes somehow. Perhaps it could be something as simple as sailing a proposed route and marking the location of any sunken ships or rocks ya come across on a map the merchant gives ya. Maybe ya can even get a small cut of gold every certain number of days suggesting more and more merchants are using that route. The better job ya do at marking stuff, the more will use it and the more $$$ ya get. Or something.
For gold hoarders quests, it’d be cool to have neat trinkets in the chests and allow us to look inside chests before selling them. Give us a chance to take the cool trinkets out to decorate out ships with and then sell the rest to the trading company for a bit less reward. Some trinkets could even overlap with ones that npc’s are looking for.
For the order of souls, it’d be cool to have grave robbing be a quest type. You go to an island, find one of its graves, then use your shovel to dig up a casket. Like with the gold hoarders chests, let players peek inside to take trinkets that might be there for their own quests/decoration.
Maybe have an artist trading company, sending you out to find various images of landscapes/seascapes to ‘paint’ where you take an in-game screenshot and the game makes it look like a painting.
Enemies:
Add more aggressive animals like boars, or angry birds/bats, more snakes
Add more death animation for skeletons.
Add more skeleton variety (armored ones, semi-clothed ones, ones using weird items as weapons, ones that throw stuff at you).
Make skeleton bosses require more than pure damage to defeat, such as having to shoot their armor off, or having to having to hold up a lantern to weaken them, or have everyone plays a song to weaken them, or something in the environment to weaken them.
Other:
Make the radial menu sticky, as in, make it so it doesn’t de-select what your chose a moment after ya moved the thumbstick in that direction. If I hit up on the thumbstick, the top option should remain selected until I move it to some other direction.
Let players be able to offer ‘cheers’ (lifting your cup) as an alternative left trigger input for the mug. Have this automatically do a friend request just like the Make Friends emote does.
Add some taunting emotes.
Add some items that can crafted in some way.
Add a torch that can be used to light some things on fire (enemies, maybe brush that when burned away lets you enter a hidden cave, sails, other torches in dark areas).
