On Her Existence [6.4 Raid Story Spoilers]

[Cleretic]

So its likely maybe the Ivalice Raids are going to be required like how they turned Crystal Tower into a requirement.

I actually suspect these days that they only pretended to make the Crystal Tower raids a requirement because of G'raha. That was a very visible reason to make it required, so we could all look at it and go 'oh yeah that makes sense', but the secret real reason was that it lets them use everything else the Crystal Tower raids introduced: Xande, Amon, the Fourth Calamity, and both the lore and events around the World of Darkness.

Basically, Endwalker needed the Crystal Tower raids for every single reason except G'raha Tia, so they used G'raha Tia to throw us off the scent.

I don't think they'll make the Ivalice raids required, because the only thing that'd give us here is Ultima, and they don't even need Ultima to tell a story about auracite coming from space; we know they don't, they just did it.


(Also, while we're generally immune to it by way of having already done these stories a lot of years before, making the Crystal Tower mandatory was actually a broadly hated choice to most of the playerbase, especially the new players that suddenly had even more stuff asked of them before reaching Heavensward. Ivalice would make the same barrier for Shadowbringers, and god knows how bad things will get when the most popular expansion is gated behind fairly disliked alliance raids.)