Why? Because there's a huge suite of content that is either not in the game anymore at all, or unused/underused in the open world sandbox. Especially from the time-limited adventures, so much content has been wasted. Reintroducing/revamping these features will allow new content to more easily and quickly be implemented, allowing more time to be put into bug fixing and polishing. Hopefully this would have the same effect as the Shrouded Spoils update in year 1, with the main goals to add more unpredictability and variety to the sandbox.
With all that said, here's the list of features they can reintroduce/revamp.
Adventure Content
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Shrouded Islands
Randomly cover individual islands in the green fog from the Shrouded Islands, maybe have only phantoms and phantom loot spawn on the island when this happens. Fog can be annoying, sure, but this would add a bit more dynamism and atmosphere in the world. -
Captured Prisoners in Sea Forts
Maybe this could be in the form of an emergent voyage that prompts you to defeat a specific Sea Fort that has an NPC trapped inside, giving extra rewards or perhaps a free cosmetic. -
Megalodon Spawners
Rare items you can find around the world that spawns a megalodon when you shoot it out of a cannon in open water, perhaps a harder meg than usual. This is an item from The Shrouded Deep adventure. -
Gunpowder Rowboats
An abandoned item from the Lost Sands adventure that has a reinforced gunpowder barrel strapped to the back with a fuse. Adds to the current roster of rowboat variants and adds a content where experienced players might use explosives competitively. -
Ferryman's Lantern Quest
From both The Forsaken Hunter adventure and Fate of the Damned tall tale, this Order of Souls voyage could have you following ghostly footsteps to dig up skulls or chests. By creating a couple paths on each large island this voyage type could be easily random in a way the story-based content isn't. -
Emergent Sea of The Damned Voyages
By reformatting A Hunter's Cry adventure, we can have emergent SotD voyages that are like the Skull of Siren Song. Except for this voyage, you enter a portal and swap servers to a SotD map! Several crews from different servers can join, competing for loot before leaving. Maybe a unique part of this area can be that you merge back to the base world when sinking. -
Emergent Siren Shrine voyage
From The Siren's Prize, just an emergent bottle voyage that adds a specific Shrine with extra loot and combat, like Breath of the Sea voyages but slightly different. Would add more reasons to visit shrines more than once. -
Ashen Lord in the Devil's Roar's fortress.
The fortress in the Devil's Roar in pretty much never done, replacing the regular fort experience with a buffed up Ashen Lord like in The Herald of the Flame, a special green and red fiery tornado, and a large amount of loot as a reward, will help give new life to this fort. -
Captured Sea Forts
Like in Returned of the Damned, give players the ability to "capture" every Sea Fort on the map. If you capture every one on the map, you get a huge reward, but other crews get extra rewards if they convert your captured Sea Forts. Really easy way to make Sea Forts more exciting and engage in longer play. -
Star-aligning Voyages
Using the voyage from The Secret Wilds, this quest can involve finding the right perspective on an island to find a constellation formation, using a mask for special vision. This quest type was super cool in the adventure, and by creating new variations across the map it would be one of the best quest types.
Tall Tale Content
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Ancient Vaults
New Quest type that sends you to the Ancient Vaults to solve a puzzle similar to the Shroudbreaker Tall Tale. -
Ambushing Skeleton Circles
Maybe, as a variant to Order of Souls quests, skeletons you're hunting can sometimes be found sitting in a circle similar to how they do in The Cursed Rogue. This would just make attacking them feel more organic. Perhaps skeletons can be found randomly, outside of quests, sitting in circles and otherwise lounging around the world to make it feel more alive. -
Wooden-Board puzzles
Like the puzzles where you have to line up the outline of a wooden board to match the landscape, but varied randomly across multiple islands. Could be a new quest type, or a random found one so there don't have to be too many variants -
Constellation Voyages
Like the Stars of a Thief tall tale, this would be a new quest type where you follow constellations as cardinal directions to find the island with treasure. a small addition to several island can be added as a conclusion to this voyage. -
Traps
Whilst Rare did eventually add more traps to the world, they are still super sparse. Not only would I like to see more traps throughout the world, but also emergent reasons to traverse trap gauntlets like found on Sailor's Bounty. -
Decoding Skeleton Language
Revenge of the Morningstar has you decoding skeleton language as clues for where to find treasure. This could easily be expanding into its own quest type, where you not only hunt skeleton messages, but the means to translate them too. This use of skeleton language could be sprinkled around the rest of the world too. -
Shores of Gold
Any reason to revisit this majestic island would be amazing, but especially as a Pirate Legend voyage would be great. Any series of quests could be recycled to work specifically for this island. -
Following Ghost Ships
Similar to the Ferryman's Lantern quest, this emergent discovery could have you follow the trails of sunken ships, finding their wreck site at a sea bed and looting clues. -
Fire traps
An easy way to revamp part of The Devil's Roar is to introduce the traps from Heart of Fire to the rest of the map. They'd even be cool to have around the rest of the world as well. -
Sea of the Damned map expansion
Given SoT can't really add more to the main map, maybe the Sea of the Damned could be an alternative server location to visit and do quests within. It could simply be a reskin of the normal map, or contain brand new islands. Maybe the gimmick of the world is that its a lot more concentrated than the base game, so 6 ships share only one region (The Wilds, Ancient Isles, etc). To balance this, perhaps crews will server merge when sunk. Between A Pirate's Life and Legend of Monkey Island, a ton of assets around exist to create this new world. -
Kraken Body
Most of The Sunken Pearl's content WAS actually reused in season 4's Siren Shrines, but one piece of content that would be cool to see is the Kraken's Body. Maybe it's seen briefly in approach before the regular fight starts, or maybe the head emerges once you defeat all the tentacles sometimes, etc.
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Swamp Lands
The Bayou is a very cool environment in Captains of the Damned, would be great to see these trees and landscape make its way into the main world, either as an edit to existing islands, or as small additions around the map. -
Lantern Lighting
As a rare quest type, maybe a Lighthouse Lens can appear on islands and have you lighting spawned lanterns across a landscape. -
Locked Doors across the world
Would be fun to find randomly locked structures across the world that you need to hunt a key to unlock and gain loot from. -
Roaming NPCs
The Legend of Monkey Island mostly adding things that only work in the context of a curated story experience, (with the exception of ziplines which thankfully got added soon after), but one thing they did add is the first NPCs that are actually free to roam around and/or follow you. This would help make the world fee much more alive if used elsewhere too. -
Invisibility
In the third Legend of Monkey Island, Guybrush goes slightly invisible, and the effect would make for a cool potion effect that slightly reduces how visible players are.
Misc
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Bomb throwing skeletons
If you've ever seem an Ashen Lord "unrendered", you can see that they're actually just regular skeletons sized up. This means that regular skeletons can have rare variations where they gain a reskinned power from an Ashen Lord. One of these is a "bomb thrower" that chucks blunderbombs like the Ashen Lords do with a fireball. They could also lob one occasionally into the air like Ashen Lords do with meteors, where it flies up then arks downwards and explodes on the floor for extra damage. -
Other sized Shipwrecks
Sloop and Brigantine sized shipwrecks can be added as variations to random shipwrecks, this would make galleon shipwrecks rarer and more excitably lucrative.
Siren Spawning -
Random Sirens can be very annoying, but they would be more fun if they spawned in specific contexts. For example, a single large group could spawn at a shipwreck, or they could spawn to defend a Mermaid statue instead of it doing slow area damage.
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Burying Treasure
The Quest Board is pretty much completely abandoned, because there's no reason to do them nor a reason to add quests. If the limit to buried maps was removed, so you could create extremely lucrative maps, and you automatically got rewards gold and rep when you post with a bonus, there could be a lot more reason to do them.
I could probably list more, but I think my point is made. The amount of events, voyages, and enemy types that could be created by just reusing and remixing existing content is vast. Are there any nascent features you think can be expanded/reintroduced?
