Alessa never wears that helmet that's in the picture -or at least, you can't see it, since hats and cloaks can be made invisible if you want them to be. I usually leave my guild cloak visible in town, but I keep the hat hidden all the time. It annoys me. Alessa just has dark hair pulled up in a bun - that seemed the most warrior-like to me! She has already gotten rid of part of this armor - the red ringmail shirt and the gloves - so she looks a little different. And as soon as she gets out of pre-Sear, which will be soon, she'll probably get yet another set of armor, anyway. (I guess that will be the bustier-looking thing that Columbine's Io had on in that other screenshot (here).
The thing that I said was a spoiler was about the Searing. You can tell the difference if you compare the screenshot I linked two paragraphs ago, which is post-Sear, with this one - and you can even tell the difference a little bit in the three headshots at the bottom of the picture of Alessa. Pre-Searing Ascalon is beautiful - it's autumn, and there are falling leaves, and flowers in the fields, and so forth. There are hints of what's coming, though, if you're attentive. There are Charr attacking the walls - the big cat-people. When you do the last pre-Sear quest, the NPC who gives it to you asks you if you're SURE; you won't be able to come back "for a while," he says. And then what happens, not very surprisingly if you've paid attention at all, is some sort of apocalyptic event. It's not very well explained, except that the Charr get through the wall, and things blow up, and so forth. (This being a D&D-style world, you have to assume that the explosions are created by magic, I guess.) So in the rest of the game Ascalon is just ruins - although I suspect that eventually we will get to some other places that aren't quite so nasty-looking. We have gotten up into the mountains a little in the past couple of days, and it looks pretty normal. Y'know, except for the ice monsters and things - but the pre-Sear mountains had those too.