I always wondered then why they didn't have more cosmetic options for gear. Like, maybe your Mythoclast is a different color if you get it during flawless raider or something. Or maybe your glowhoo is a different color if you slay Crota in less than 20 minutes. That seems in the spirit of what they have always talked about with regards to gear telling a story.

I never thought of it that way, but that's a pretty cool idea. Quest to get the weapon, if you do it in a certain way you get a cosmetically different one. I like it!

"I got my SGA from opening crates on Mars."
"Me too."

Also that camp shell?

Before the vanilla release Deej said that your gear would tell others what you'd done, what you've accomplished. You'd see a Guardian's gear, compliment her, and ask how she got it. And she'd tell you, and then offer to help you get that gear.

The quests are an awesome way to tie gear to activities. If you have Thorn we can trade stories of fighting waves of hive waiting for that one jerk in the last wave. I want to have awesome Gjallerhorn stories from me getting it, and from helping others.

I hope I'm wrong, though. That would literally be pay-to-win.

And the Sleeper Simulant. And First Curse. Black Spindle. No Time to Explain. Touch of Malice. Swords. ...

I am aware that other exotics are available through quests ;)

I'm saying it makes me happy that Bungie is letting us get Gjallarhorn that way as well.

There's no way this expansion is the same size as TTK. Not that there's anything wrong with that... I'm really happy with how it's looking so far. But with only 1 new strike, RoI will certainly be smaller in scale than TTK. Sounds larger than TDB or HoW, though... $30 seems like the right price to me :)

Why does it having only one strike mean it's smaller than TTK? While the replayability of strikes is good, they rarely represent all that much new content or space, and almost zero story. There are a hand full of strikes I'd trade for a story mission, raid area, or social space without a second thought.

I agree. It seems to me that new strikes result in the smallest amount of mileage gained for work put in compared to raids, social spaces, and pvp maps. Most strike playstyles are completely randomly assigned, so other than that first time through, the strike isn't really going to be seen much, and unless it has amazing special best in slot drops, it won't be intentionally played much either (though it will be farmed in the most exploitative way possible).

My point was not that the strikes themselves make up a substantial part of any expansion, but that the number of strikes included in each expansion seems to correlate to the overall size of the expansion. At least that has been the case so far. Smaller expansions get fewer strikes, larger get more.

I realize you aren't betting your life on the correlation, but to be clear we are working with a sample size of 3 different sized releases. Arguably, nothing will be as large as the initial release, so you could almost say the sample size is two.

I'm including all releases in my thought process; Vanilla, TDB, HoW, TTK, and the April update.

I'm not trying to say anything definite or hardlined, just sharing my own reaction and interpretation, in terms of how I'm setting my own expectations. Hearing things like "new campaign and quests" are very vague. That doesn't really give me any idea of the scope of the expansion. But we can look at how Bungie likes to work Strikes into the game and extrapolate a bit from that. We know they like to use Strikes as punctuation points during a longer campaign (Vanilla, TTK) or as fulminations of shorter story quests (TDB, April Update). So when I hear that Rise of Iron includes 1 strike, that makes me think "cool, probably a short story campaign that culminates in a strike, and then closes out with a raid (with some side quests along the way)". It could easily end up being nothing like what I'm assuming, but that's the ballpark I'm thinking of when it comes to setting my expectations :)