I remember this particular issue making my WoW character look like a blob monster that crawled out of RuPaul's fabulously disheveled closet.

So I actually wrote a section in the thread about this as I saw it was one of the concerns being voiced when the Game Informer Article first came out, but I cut it because it went against the flow of the thread. Bungie has said before that they're trying to design every armor piece in a way so that it doesn't horrifically clash with every other armor piece in the game. With regards to Exotics, that shouldn't be too difficult to accomplish, as long as you use the geometry of an existing armor piece and then "exotify" it, then you don't need to worry too terribly about horribly clashing armor. For example, in the above picture, I'd argue that the Titan is clearly wearing an Exotic Chest Piece. It's very noticable (which helps anticipation as I mentioned later in this sub thread), but really in the scheme of things it wouldn't be too hard to color it blue and retexture it so that it matched the materials of the rest of the armor and then pass it off as a regular piece of armor. If you see anything that makes you frown, feel free to let me know, but I've not yet see anything that was too out of place or concerning, so we'll play it by ear.

I'm almost certain that you'll be able to match things with a 'colour' type system like in Halo. In [url=http://imgur.com/a/Hr5Bt]US splendid's imgur album of the gameinformer armour customizations[/url], we can see 2 warlocks (the first 2) with almost identical helmets. The difference coming down to colour, emblem and what seems to be an attachement. I believe that we'll be ablel to customize our armour with those type of things. That famous hunter in the E3 gameplay, she has a monocle. That circle of light over her visor. Well, I also believe we've seen that hunter without that light in other media. In own of the walkthroughs, someone mentions that the hunter decked her guardian out recently with the addition of that monocle. So what if, like in Halo: Reach, you could add attachments to your armour/helmets. The warlock helmet that we see in the album would have that horn as an attachement. Hunter has that monocle. And the colour can be changed to fit how you want your guardian to look. Emblems and all. Plus I doubt Bungie would make an all exotic armour set for those who want to be completionists and deck themself out with a uniform armour set. They would likely just have one exotic in the entire armour set, the others being superiors.

My experience in these types of situations has been that people will choose function over form. In other words, if a helmet will prevent critical hits 15% of the time, people will still choose it even if it clashes with their boots.

Really.? Even in games like darksouls I was a completely cosmetic. I only equipped my character with things that looks good c:

Would you say that the vast majority of the player base did the same?

I know. I'm just someone who enjoys having a good looking character. It annoys me when I've found an epic looking piece of armor but it means I have to substitute it for another piece with good stats. Hopefully their's an "understat" system.

Tell me more about this "understat" concept of yours. I'm curious to know how it's supposed to work. Does it mean that, if you wear a 2nd piece of exotic armor, the crazy bonuses are removed? The way I understand it, exotic armor pieces are just that: pieces. Whether that means such pieces are unique in and of themselves or not is immaterial, because it would be extremely unlikely that someone would have the time or patience to seek out all the pieces of an entire SET of exotic armor. By customizing & color coordinating, you can come close enough to have the piece look like it belongs to a particular set. A good example of this can be seen [url=http://i.imgur.com/31jsLa6.png]here[/url]. The checst piece differs structurally & stylistically from the rest of the Titan's armor, but the colors have been coordinated in such a way as to make it fit in.

Let's say each piece comes pared with an invisible bit under it that actually holds the stats. These bits can be switched around different pieces of armor (Of the same kind.) Basically, it makes armor aesthetic so you can pair your good looking armor with the good stats, and the bad looking armor with the bad stats. It's not unbalancing either since it's only switching around the looks of armor.

Wait, but then you can't tell if someone is wearing exotic or regular armor since they can just switch all of their regular armor to look exotic. It gives the other players less info about what the player's armor does because you can't tell what stuff is just by looking at it.

... So?

It matters. This is a potentially thorny topic to bring up perhaps, but one of the problems with Armor Abillities from Halo Reach is that you couldn't easily anticipate which opponent had what abillity. The only Armor Abillity that you could easily identify simply by looking at the player model from the front or the sides was Jetpack, everything else was too minor from a model standpoint to be able to discern in the heat of combat. As a result, the only way that you could tell that someone had any particular abillity is if you saw him use it, which for things like Armor Lock was often too late. As a result, players had to premptively play around several armor abillities at once, which could make the game feel very frustrating. Destiny is not like Halo Reach, there will be many more abillities in Destiny than there were in Halo, and they will be placed on all sorts of items from Focuses to Armor to Weapons. If my opponent has a chest plate that protects him from explosive damage, that would be nice to know before I unload my rocket launcher on him. If my opponent has a chest piece that increases his regeneration, that would also be nice to know before I pursue a weakened opponent behind cover. Hopefully you get the idea, I can list off examples all day. Anyways, if players are unable to anticipate what crazy things their opponents might do, then the game becomes really frustrating. Imagine playing Halo where every gun is reskinned to look like the Plasma Pistol, and hopefully that conveys the general sense of what Destiny would be like if we had understatted exotics. It's cool to be able to look at a player's armor and say "Oh yeah, I saw a bloke who was wearing that chest piece last week, he's going to cloak when he crouches", players feel very rewarded for knowing that sort of thing. A ramble as always, and I haven't even gotten around to replying to your original post >_>

I just don't see the importance of knowing that. This isn't a competitive arena based game like Halo used to be. I'm sure they will figure something out for the competitive part of multiplayer, but still.