These seem reasonable. My own priorities would be, after the obligatory bugs ‘n’ glitches:
Cosmetics. Fix them. Fix the mandatory hair loss. Add a “hide hat” option. Add transmogs. Let us change hair and makeup, and let us actually get tats. Unlike Valhalla, where tattoos were hardly a draw, here they could be wild. There is even a main quest thing that would be made infinitely better if we actually could get and see new ink.
Provide some basic AI for cars and pedestrians. Even if all they did was have vehicles not plow through whatever is in front of them (because I guess they can’t know that something is in front of them), it would be an improvement.
Ideally, you would have a rudimentary “job” system, so that large trucks would generally traverse the city en route to either industrial areas or out of the city entirely, while delivery trucks would run circuits of shops and businesses. Personal cars could be left relatively random, or some areas that would naturally have car traffic could be prioritized. Traffic should also vary by time of day. Same for pedestrians. I’d love to see some sort of nav mesh that would channel people to and from housing and work, or around shopping, etc., even in a basic fashion.
Revamp crafting. One possibility would be to have weapons and armor always scale to your level, but within their quality tier only, and use crafting solely to take things from one tier to a higher tier. So, whenever you found that common pistol, its stats would be whatever they should be for a pistol at your level, and ever time you level, those stats would go up accordingly. But if you found the same pistol, only at rare quality, its stats would be higher at every level as well. By raising the quality level via crafting, you would also get the tier bonuses like random effects and mod slots like you do now, but you could eliminate the utterly useless, costly, and tedious constant upgrading (which no one does, but which seems to be the reason for crafting).
Add the option to automatically disassemble gear on looting, gated by type and quality, excluding legendaries and iconic perhaps to guard against “oops!” moments.
Make gangs more meaningful, starting with making their territory more meaningful. Give the gang members a rudimentary AI that has them patrol more or less randomly throughout their turf, maybe with certain spots weighted to insure that a certain number (0-n) are usually hanging around key spots. Of course, none of this will do much unless they introduce a faction system, so running from one gang area to another (Warriors, come out and plaaaaay!) means something.
Speaking of that, fix the cops. Create a virtual (doesn’t have to be on the map or accessible to the player) precinct house for each zone. Create rudimentary patrol routes for cops, like with gangs. When you commit a crime, check to see if anyone actually witnesses it, and if not, whatever. If so, either send patrollers near by to the loc, or dispatch a patrol from the precinct, arriving in the time it would take a vehicle to get from the virtual precinct location to the site of the crime. You could even have the cops appear like your summoned vehicle, rather than tracing the entire route. Of course, like the gang situation, this is all fairly meaningless without some sort of “heat” system, which I’m not sure is really the way the game wants to (or should) go.
As an aside, the whole role of law enforcement in the game feels under-baked. You are clearly not supposed to fight the law, because they law will win, yet the cops ignore everything except what falls into a very narrow band of activities, and forget stuff really quick. The lore and the dialog makes frequent reference to being wanted or having a price on your head, etc. but there is no system for actually tracking anything other than the immediate “we magically saw you hurt that civilian in an alley” system.
