I always thought that the quests in Helbreath were very limited. Killing a certain number of creatures start to be boring the 3rd time you get a quest. Another thing is that the game is also all revealed. There are no new tricks to be discovered, except for new players who never played HB before.
My idea is to enhance the Quests and exploit the NPCs, which do little things today. The quests would require talk to several NPCs or even the GMs, solve some kinds of puzzles, go to places and kill an especified monster or find an especified item. Some queste could require an party, with especified kinds of palyers. It could require the manufacture of crafting of an item. We could have NPCs in others maps than Cities, or have the GMs be in those maps. Those quests could change from time to time, which would make the game always new. Also, these quests could be kept in some secret, and discovering them would be an other challenge. Also they should happen through a whole week, month or even the whole year. I will make an example of a quest like this.
An NPC (McGraffin for example) in city gives a hint that there is something strange in Dungeon 3. He also says that Devlin should know more about it. Then you go talk to Devlin and he talks some non-understandable gibberish, but gives a hint that there is some kind of unusual magic activity going on somewhere. The player searches trhough D3 and find the related spot, it is a mana stone. This mana stone is somewhat mortiferous (casting non-stop lightings, also slowing players around it and being impossible to destroy). More and more people discover it and talk begin to spread. People should start to ask questions to the GMs. Until somebody asks a GM what is a mana collector made of. Then he says that its made mostly of iron, but it's core is made of a gem ware. GM says that once an very powerful mana collector was made out of a magic diamond and a very large structure to contain the big amount of energy. Players (probably united in guilds) must come out with a huge amount of iron, some mithral and a diamond ware, and hands it out to a GM or unite it all in the guildmaster bag. When near manastone the guildmaster types out a command (told by the GM) and the equipment is constructed (it must be near the manastone). Then the mana collector starts to absorbs the manastone enetrgy and both starts to lose endurance. Players must stay and repair the equipment with pickaxes, or else it is destroyed. The manastone continues to unleash lightning and other spells to players. If the players succeed they have an enourmous ammount of energy contained, which can be use to imbue weapons that get more powerful in a short amount of time. The mana collector can only be used by the guildmaster which constructed it. The power could goes for 15 minutes and be used mostly to kill powerfull monsters. Or else the manacollector could drop a lot of gems and stones (like meriens, xelimas, zems, rubys, emeralds, sapphires, diamonds) and also a lot os experience to the whole guild.
This could be some crazy quest idea, but i came out with it in the moment. It could be proven very hard to implement, but i am sure the GMs and developers togheter can comeout with some nice ideas. But the objective is to make something that would take sometime to accomplish, exploiting all of the game propabilities and requiring players to organize themselves other than Elvine or Aresden and also giving some different rewards (other than contribution, which is not very useful). Giving rare itens i guess should not be the objective, but to give away itens which are somewhat common, but hard to make, like gem ware, upgraded weapons or alchemy potions.
Hope you like the idea! :D
