Ultimately I'm not very worried, because there are
over 122 different pieces of armor in the game.
I think I counted 18 different sets of armor,
8 different types of shields,
And wearing different types of armor (novice, regular, etc) depends on your combat level, so not everybody is going to have the same type of armor.
PLUS, there are different armor types made from the 4 types of
common ingots, so it gives the formula:
Armor Type x Armor Level x Ingot Type = All the different styles of armor.
That's a shit ton of armor styles.
EDIT:
This is only Armor covered, I'm not even going to talk about weapons because it covers the same principles.
How about... food, recipes.
Different areas of the map will see different types of plants grow better, and some settlements will have more of one ingredient than another. There are dozens of different recipes, so players will really get to choose what they WANT to make rather than what they HAVE to.
Hopefully horses will be similar in that they have different traits when raised differently,
And I almost forgot to add that smiths with higher levels will create items with a higher quality than others.