First off, you should hire me as a co-designer for the game.

Now here's what it needs:

Water

Phantom hourglass had seafaring in 2008 on a DS with 4 MB of ram, 4 MEGABYTES OF RAM.
When developers say that seafaring is too cost expensive, you are being scammed by that developer and he is following an idiot trend.

Sea of thieves has seafaring and for a medieval themed game, it's almost a requirement now to fit the theme in 2025 for the sake of QUALITY.

There are GPU readbacks for water and phantom hourglass renders 3 grids of the ocean around the player.

Dungeon Improvements

Nothing gets more boring than running the generic classic mabinogi dungeons.
You desperately need to add world of warcraft style rooms that are inter-networked with good halls.
Even adding some random variation per dungeon theme would be nice.

Dungeon puzzles

Mabinogi has a close feeling relationship to zelda style mechanics, adding randomly generated puzzles to the dungeons will GREATLY improve gameplay. The designers of zelda dungeons base their dungeons on CLOCKS because of how the classes interact with the other scripts to create a flowing mechanical structure. It's not that hard, you just spiderweb different elements to activate in different orders.

Additionally, a lot of the highest rated zelda dungeons have you go from a lower floor back to a higher floor and change the mobs.
This makes the dungeon feel less linear, sometimes even changing the rooms on the original floor or opening new doorways.


Open world movement, spacial culling and world pvp

The guy who said casual games sell was a liar, fortnite is not casual. World of warcraft made 800k new players from their first world championship arena pvp tournament. World of warcraft players desperately need a new PVP game because blizzard REMOVED pvp essentially from the base game and made everyone quit world of warcraft (because now it's world of softcraft).

Open world unzoned exploration is a requirement for 2025 quality PC games. There is no hardware limitations preventing you from doing this and it's not
the year 2001 anymore. You need to tie in all the zones and have it open world like world of warcraft.


Crafting minigames

Everyone wants better minigames. The tailoring minigame is good, but doing the same sewing pattern over and over is stupid. It should at the very least
generate a more complicated pattern the more rare the item.
Any blacksmithing mini games. Hammering out the weapon and improving it's stats this way would be nice.
Seafaring based mini games (Seafaring is required)

The shooting star events excavation mini games were cool, they don't do those anymore. Improving on this would be awesome for mining.
for example, in the game spectrobes you can blow into the mic to "dust off" the mined materials to get a better view of what you are mining, and that is also a DS game.


Spacial Voice Chat

This is easy to implement and it's highly sought after, even fortnite has recently added it.

Please remove janky systems and overpowered skills like arcana

I don't know if people are aware, but arcana literally makes the old skills USELESS in every aspect. There is no reason anyone would use a regular skill over arcana for any reason at all except for counter-attack.
things like festia and transformations also feel extremely janky and bad.


List of things that can be used for this in unreal:

Improving the environment and adding snow displacement (like in red dead redemption) requires render targets painting and displacement PBR.
Adding interactive grass can be done with a mixture of grass wind and field effect particle grass.
The witcher uses unreal particles rendered as leaves to get the ultimate leaf look for trees, farther away the particles are rendered as square images.

Unreal does not support water collision, do NOT use their water plugin, it's a janky mess.
To do water collision in unreal it has to be custom coded (with a GPU readback for wave collision)
You can use deprecated dynamic mesh component, because it runs faster than procedural mesh component, but I don't suggest it.

In unreal, you can attach a physics item to a bone slot and have thing that move around (like scarves or necklaces).

There is a plugin that allows you to call a website to "spray" a gif or image (http call) that would be cool to use as custom decals for subscribers on parts of an item dye.

etc, etc.


Basically, I feel that the massive 76 million dollar flop of kartrider: drift is happening again.
The old players are going to be very mad when their items are all removed, and on top of that mobile will probably drop around the same time.
Meaning most of the old players will probably move to mobile after the initial trial period.
This paired with the fact they are splitting funds between mobile and PC, and they are not intertwining between each other or cross platform somehow.
The story seems to be barely iterated on when it needs to be fully spread out. We don't care if you use AI to generate the story. Only an ignorant kid would say that he cares. Please just make a better story more elaborated story.

If this ends up the same janky game with 2001 zone maps, AFKers and janky skills like arcana, I can guarantee you are going to flop harder than kartrider.
You won't be able to not only sell gacha trash in a reskinned old game, but also compete it between the PC and the mobile version.
You HAVE to make it quality and right. You have to intertwine PC and mobile somehow and use MODERN TECHNOLOGY.
The gamer community is so over saturated with reskinned old games that it's not even funny, no one wants to play them anymore.
I do not think that you will even make your money back if you don't make the game a 2025 quality game, NOT a 2001 quality game.

People will use their laziness and acceptance of low quality as an excuse, but it is not an excuse for this or anything else in reality.
Quality makes better games, and better games sell more.
Competitive games like fortnite also sell more, and if you try to argue with that you are an idiot.

Also, always consider quality over p2W as it will hold your players longer.
I would rather subscribe for 7 dollars a month than p2w, but paying for clothes is fine.

Lastly, if you want to avoid lawsuits I would highly suggest not leading the players on with purchases in the old game that will not transfer over to the new game. It's already law in places that you can't gamble on games and fortnite has been sued for scamming kids. I would not be surprised if someone dropped 10k dollars on your game, lost their items and sued you for a million because you didn't warn them months in advance or on the purchase page that their items will soon be gone anyway.