Basically everything apart from animation and lag in my opinion. Especially the environmental design and world building. The game just looks pretty. Also, the gameplay loop with a maxed account. Here is some yap about that:
The most important part of how the update hooked me is how the gameplay loop and things to do in the game feel. I like to think of Arcane Odyssey as a “stuff to do” game, meaning there is always something to accomplish. I’ll use a lost treasure chart in the bronze sea to give an example. You start out looking for a rival so you can get a mystical or legendary treasure chart, while travelling on the water you do the diving spots on the way because they are free sources of good reagents and chests with a higher chance of giving sunkens and do the shipwrecks in the way for some free money from cargo and free treasure charts that always point to nearby island. You fight the rival and get a legendary chart to begin solving it, you go island to island continuously doing the diving spots on the way until you get to the final spot, on one of the islands you go to for the chart you see an enemy tower there, so you take the leaders bounty poster and conquer the tower and you get one of the new weapons from the boss and a rare spell from one of the chests at the bottom. You get a lost chart after the final spot and begin solving that, that takes you from island to island, getting modified gear cause they give more chests, after the second spot the special pirate faction starts sending high tier ships like brigs and ketches after you that you can sink to get more followers and add them to your fleet. The chart takes you to cassia bay so you do the Caesar boss fight there as well cause why not. After the final spot you get a lost knowledge that you can either sell for a really good price or modify one of your own abilities so you have an actual tangible change to your build from your effort. Then after you go to Ravenna or some island with a port and sell the sealed chests you have for some more cannon balls and maybe another rare spell or technique.
This entire process took like 2 or 3 hours of just playing the game and interacting with the systems in it, and at the end of it you have something that tangibly changes your build or sells for a high price and a bunch of modified gear that you can use or sell, plus gems and maybe some rare or lost spells and techniques. This gameplay loop is just about exactly what I want in a game, especially an rpg. Every system connected to every other system and being able to have a goal for a play session that i can mess around while completing. Kind of like skyrim if you’ve played that. This loop is what i like the most about pve in arcane odyssey and why i can play for so long, and this update makes it 10x better.