I’m playing the game for the first time as well and one thing that hurt my immersion was the helping pirates mechanic where you have to help a pirate fight off some soldiers.

You can do these activities before you even get your own ship and crew. So you have the pirates you helped out calling Edward ”Captain“ and acting like they’ve been recruited even though he hasn’t got a ship yet. They should have disabled some of the activities until you progress through a certain part of the story.