You want to have equipment that you earned and not everyone and their mothers already owns. Signature weapons and equipment that truly tested your skills. You want a title that others recognize as unique and not 2000 players with the same "General of the gods" title.

You want to look and dress in your own way without facing penalties that restrict your choices of garments and equipment to a point that everyone is wearing the same body armor and helmet because thats the best armor to have. You want to step out of a bar and look around and see players all wearing what they like. Clothing,Armor, Weapons, shoudl be 30% generic and 70% unique. All the raiders in games like AOC and WoW are wearing similar or identical gear becuase thats all thats available.

I agree, it looks boring when everyone looks exactly the same (unless its a faction army they should wear the same armors/weapons).

It would be cool if you could customize your character's looks based on stuff you find. For example, you might tie a black bandana around your left forearm or tuck an eagle feather in your hat. Not only would it serve the purpose of allowing characters to look different (rather than everyone just wearing the best gear and looking identical) it could also serve a social function like showing faction membership, etc.

This sort of thing was implemented into a fun mod named "Garrysmod". Of course you have to download the addon to try it out. It enables you to put anything anywhere on your body. Of course this is the basic idea of the main post, and it is indeed genius. But do you have any idea how hard it is to hardcode something like that into a game? That alone could increase development time by a month. Unless of course, the developer team is constructed of over 50 dedicated people.

The best system I ever saw for the problems described in this thread (cookie cutter gear and appearances) was in Diablo 2(non expansion). In this system the best gears stats were randomly chosen upon dropping(including color which depended on certain stats, of course in fallout we would have dyes and paints). Now I know D2 was a fantasy game of a different sort than fallout, but it was the best system i've ever seen. I hate item sets and cookie cutter raid gear... blech... *The first time I saw a Deathclaw...well, now that's a story for a different day.*

It does kind of ruin it a little bit when the "super rare" "incredibly hard-to-find" gear you're wearing is also being worn by the six people standing next to you. Even the ability to choose something as simple as the colors would be at least something of a fix for this problem.

In the case of Fallout, it doesn't make a lot of sense that two pieces of gear that have supposedly been scavenged from god-knows-where looks identical. Imagine a bunch of those guys from the road warrior wearing matching armor. I don't think so.