So we’ve finally made it to what is offically the first day of Blaugust this year! July has been a bit of a wild ride for me with time off, Shadowbringers launch and hosting a friend for a week. It’s the reason why I didn’t really want to tie down on a “goals for the month” post. However August should be calmer and thus I feel like I can actually devote some time to setting goals for the month.
MMO Goals
Cap weekly on the new tomestones in FFXIV and get healing gear upgrades
Level my Black Mage to 80. Level my Red Mage to 80
Level my Alchemist to 70. Level my Culinarian to 50. Level my Botanist and Miner to 80
Poke away at the ARR Relic chain for the White Mage weapon. I really want more transmog options… I’m currently at the Atma step.
Play through Nazjatar and Mechagon content in WoW and unlock flying
Play some GW2
Non-MMO Goals
Play through and write about FFVIII, not necessarily finish it though
Play through and write about Spider-man on the PS4
So as you can see for August my main focus will still be on FFXIV and getting stuff done there. Otherwise I want to put some time in the new WoW content and some time in general playing Guild Wars 2. Finally I already announced I wanted to be playing FFVIII and Spider-man so I will be doing just that. I’m hoping to finish Spider-man this month, I’m not aiming to finish FFVIII but I do want to make some decent progress.
All in all I think all the goals I’ve set are doable, I just need to be smart with planning my game time to achieve all of them.
Today the first day of the Blaugust schedule started and we are calling it prep week. I know it’s not officially August yet but nonetheless it can’t hurt to start a few days in advance laying out what I’m planning to do for Blaugust exactly. Writing a blog post every day isn’t necessarily as easy as it may sound, especially when you don’t have a variety of topics to write about. So today I’m going to talk a little bit about how I want to tackle the every day blog posting and what kind of posts you can expect from me over the coming five weeks.
FFXIV progress posts. This will probably still be my main game over the coming weeks. With the new tomestones out on Tuesday and me wanting to atleast attempt to do some Savage content next to leveling up my jobs I will probably have enough to write about for a decent amount of posts. Most will probably be just a quick insight of where I’m standing at the moment progress wise but I may write about a questline or encounter here and there that I feel needs some spotlight.
WoW/GW2 posts. Now that I’m wanting to dedicate less time to FFXIV I can dedicate a bit more time to the other two MMO’s that I have installed on my PC. In WoW I’m mostly planning to explore the 8.2 content and earn flying aswell as catch up to the raid content that I’ve missed so far. In GW2 I want to continue leveling my Elementalist and hopefully push past the level 25-30 barrier that most of my characters seem to end up stuck on and hopefully be able to turn the adventures there into some entertaining posts about how much I suck at this game.
FFVIII and Spiderman posts. As I mentioned before I intend to play through FFVIII. I’ve never finished a mainstream Final Fantasy game and so I figured it was time to pick one at random and just work my way through it. Apparently I picked the one with the most convoluted battle mechanics out there but I’ll make it work. I’ll be taking notes and screenshots as I play through the game so I can make more indepth posts about the story, how far I am and what my opinions of the game are so far. I intend to do the same for Spiderman on the PS4, although that is a much shorter game so I’m probably not going to post about that one a lot.
General topics. I have a few gaming and non gaming related topics that I want to talk about aswell. I’ve taken the habit of writing my ideas down and then sitting down at a later moment to turn them into proper posts.
Next to topics I’m also working on a “posting schedule” so that I can sit down and write a blog post around the same time every day. I’ve also taken note of days where I won’t be able to post on my scheduled time or at all so I need to make sure I have a few extra posts lined up to post during that time. The big problem that I’m facing with here is that I’m horrible at sticking to schedules. Something I’ve been struggling with for a big part of my life and something that I’ve been meaning to change forever. So I’m using the Blaugust opportunity to do so and create some new, healthier, habits for myself so my days will maybe go a bit smoother and more enjoyable than they are going now.
All in all I feel like I’m more prepped this year to participate and succeed in posting every day than I have been in previous years, so let’s aim to make it work!
You’ve maybe seen it go around the blogging community but this year we are once again going to have Blaugust, as usual started up by Belghast. I’m participating again this year as a participant. Even though I’ve been blogging since forever I don’t think I’m the correct person to mentor other people. My blogging track record is shady at best and I don’t really want people to use my blog as an example of how to run things. Hell even I still don’t know how to run my own blog properly so it’s usually a small miracle if I’m able to pump out more than one post every two weeks. Anyway, this year there are a ton of people participating again, for a full list I’d recommend going over to Bel’s blog. He’s posting a list of people under every post he’s writing right now so you will have the most up to date list of people participating.
As for me and Blaugust.. I’ve decided to pick up FFVIII to play during this time so I can write a small series about it. Why number 8? Well, no reason actually. I could’ve picked any of the Final Fantasy games (except 14) and write a series about it because, gasp, I’ve never actually played a Final Fantasy game from beginning to end. I’ve not even touched a lot of the iterations. So I figured I would pick one of the games that I bought during a big steam sale and start playing that and write about it. So FFVIII it became.
I’ve played a tiny bit of the game so I could create a save file to work off of, but I’ve already hit my first wall in doing so. For some reason I can’t seem to run the game in fullscreen mode. It will either be a tiny ass window (when I have fullscreen checked) or it’s a windowed fullscreen mode where the bottom bit is falling off when I don’t have fullscreen checked. I don’t seem to be able to find a fix for this.. All the suggested things have come up with no results for me. So I will probably have to make do with the whole windowed fullscreen game and see from there. I’m also still struggling a bit to learn the keyboard scheme but I guess that’s just a matter of getting gametime in. I know that FFVIII is a bit different when it comes to the leveling and magic experience but I want to see that for myself. Maybe by playing this game I will propel myself to play more of the entries in this series but I guess we will see that later. For now I want to make an honest effort into playing this game and writing about it and hopefully take everyone with me on the journey to completing my first standalone Final Fantasy game.
In other FF related news.. I managed to get my Astrologian to level 80 yesterday meaning that I’m officially done with leveling my healers, yay! This also means that I could finally get rid of all the healer gear that was accumulating in my bags and I basically have all my healers on a high item level now so that’s nice aswell. The next class I’m focusing on is Black Mage and I managed to get that almost to 71 by spamming FATEs so I’m sure it won’t take me that long to get that to level 80 either. I also managed to get my Alchemist up to 63 and my Culinarian to 36. My Miner and Botanist are both sitting halfway to 78 so it’s been progress all around!
