I like some visual progression, but color palette swaps are enough for me. Or what they did in Final Fantasy 1 with the sprite changing once.
At the end of the day I'd rather have a smaller number of nice/thematic looking equipment sets than thousands of items with slightly different textures. The latter feels like a huge waste of money that would be better spent on other areas of the game. Even if the artists needed something to do, they could have been creating additional monsters or environments, which I would appreciate more.
Truthfully, one of the best ways this can be done is with gear that has effectively the same texture all the time, but only the meshes change.
A really nice example I've played recently is the Chaos Warrior armour from Warsword Conquest - you just get more pieces of the armour as it gets higher quality - starting with just a breastplate, ended up as full armour.
aye, the armour progression for Chaos boyz in that is dope, you go from ragtag scraps of marauder gear, to solid chaos warrior armour, to champion/knight/chosen stuff and then eventually splurge on expensive Chaos Lord gear
and as you said the fact that some of them have variants with less or more pieces of armour added to them is a neat way to go about it. the pit fighter gear being the main one that did this ay
on a similar note, i reckon Warhammer Online had some neat gear progression, as you level you tend to look more like the idealised fantasy of the class, with various iconic set styles
Ideally your character would be decked out in the swag that you've plundered. If you're not constantly slaughtering an army of bandits and robbers because you've painted a target on yourself, why even RPG?
Making a character your own is a central appeal of rpgs. Playing them just for the mechanics doesn’t make sense unless you’re an autist because it is the immersion created by these aesthetic differences, the fantasy, that turns a bunch of math into a knight battling a dragon.
Eh not the most important thing. For me, I like aesthetically pleasing armor/clothing (the reason why I have some clothing mods on BG3 and using the show camp clothing thing, they're lifesavers for me, but this also depends the environment and the act I'm playing in). I like more to see the progress in the character sheets etc.
