Back in the day, there was much discussion about this. I don't know diddly about programming, but clearly recall the difficulty was in the term "sprite" based graphics. I'm out of my tree because this can become a programming discussion, some of the dev folks past seemed strongly in favor of meeting this desire, it was often discussed as one of the many benefits of going to a "true 3d gaming engine." I hope that means more to you than it does to me
There have also been other ideas along the theme of persoanlity traits. One of those receiving a lot of player attention, was the ability for a character to inherently earn slayer properties through in game efforts. The idea was kill a ton of liches, your character would earn and retain an inherent lich slayer property. Kill a ton of daemons, you'd earn a daemon slayer property. Kill tons of everything in a set, be a super slayer in and of yourself. The properties reside on the character, not the weapon, and coded so not to be adversly affected by opposing groups. It got kicked around a lot by players, but I remember no public discussion by any of the dev folks. There were ideas of non or slowly diminishing titles on paperdolls to reflect in game behaviors, such as the "Unwanted snoop" on a traditional thief, but I don't remember most of the details sorry (some were quite funny). Anyway, just reminissing!