Your comments on Halo are somewhat wrong actually: [quote]there's no distinct "look" each person has based on what they do, some people are great at sniping, others great at the assault rifle, but you don't need to "know" that and the game doesn't make it a point to tell you "this guy is this and does good with this" and it works perfectly fine[/quote]Just like in Destiny, players of Halo actually do need to know what different people are "great" at and the game makes a definite point of telling players "this guy is this and does good with this". Unike in Destiny however, Halo does not need to rely on Body Silhouettes to communicate this information, because every Spartan is the same soldier and we do not specialize our role before we spawn*. Instead, Halo communicates all of this information to players through distinct Weapon Silhouettes. How does a player tell if someone is capable of sniping them from across the map? By seeing the Sniper of course! Whether it is on your back or in your hands, it has a very distinctive and iconic barrel, tip, bipod, scope, and butt that all help to tell you in a fraction of a second "This guy has a sniper, he is a priority target!" The same goes for every other weapon in the game, each one of them has unique shapes and features which allow you to easily spot what people are carrying even from across the map! Just look at the MLG logo I posted. All you can see is the silhouette of the Spartan, but you can still tell what weapon he is wielding, right? But what if weapons had indistinct silhouettes? What if I couldn't tell if my opponent had a DMR or a Shotgun at close range? Or as an extreme worse case example, what if I decided "The Rocket Launcher is ugly, I'm going to take advantage of a built in feature to reskin it to look like the Spiker which is much cooler!" or "This Pistol isn't very threatening, so I'm going to reskin it to look like the Sniper because it has a much better shape!" Can you imagine the frustration that such a design decision would cause? It sounds really silly, but that's sorta the chaos that you are asking for with Destiny. When I see an enemy Guardian, I definitely need to know what class that Guardian is in order to combat them effectively. If they're a Titan, I can guess that they are probably pretty tanky, so I know to stay out of melee range and whittle them down from afar. If they're a Warlock, I know they are capable of huge bursts of damage through their abillities, so I need to kill them and remove the threat as quickly as possible. What if I mistook one for the other? Would that help my chances of defeating them at all? It's not something that leads to a linear choice path nor does it lead to less diversity, the only thing Bungie has done is split all the possible characters you could create into three distinctive archetypes with distinct silhouettes, be it the Hunter's Hood and Cape, the Warlock's Helmet and Coat, or the Titan's, Helmet and Armor. On the contrary, this silhouetting enables diversity because without it a game where everyone can look like anyone else and use any abillity would be very frustrating to play because there is no sense of anticipation or causality. Does this sorta make sense? Bungie isn't trying to maliciously screw you over your sense of what your Guardian should look like, this is just the way games are designed. [quote]* The exception to the "every Spartan is the same soldier and we do not specialize our role before we spawn" thing would be Armor Abillities in Halo Reach. There were definitely problems with anticipating who had what abillity in Reach, because aside from the Jetpack, all the other Armor Abillities had identical and minimalistic silhouettes. I think it's one of the reasons why things like Armor Lock were so frustrating, you couldn't anticipate that players could use that abillity and so you couldn't realistically play around it without taking the chance that you were being overcautious because in fact they are using sprint or something.[/quote]

While the more options you have is usually better, in order to do that I think they'd have to start assigning stats to armor, like weight etc. So if you wanted to go full suit of armor as a warlock you could, but it would severely slow down your spell casting, or make cloaking/stealth impossible for the hunter. Either way, you would still end up with 99% dressed up to match their class. The hood is my most preferred look so far, but I'm still going Warlock because it fits my play style better. And although I'd probably prefer a setup like I just stated I'm ok with class specific gear as well. Though if I really disliked the look of my preferred play style im sure I'd be a little upset. Another option that would be kind cool would to be able to apply the stats of one set of gear to the look of another. Maybe take your exotic new cape to a tailor and they'd customize it to your preferred look.