What a wild ride this quarter has been!

I played the Witcher 3, which is a fantasy action role-playing game where you play as a Geralt of Rivia, silver-haired badass with cool clothes and lots of ambition. If you're a bit intuitive, you may already notice some similarities with the main character of this game and someone you know, but at the time I hadn't even considered the possibilities that me and Geralt are basically the same person.

But obvious physical similarities aside, we both share a high level of ambition - I started off Playtime completely misinterpreting what it was supposed to be. I thought we had to do something that Ghost as a design company could take some actual learnings from, and that our writeup had to be some incredible, detailed thinkpiece that would go viral on Medium. I thought the blog post going up on the Ghost website was supposed to advertise to clients the kind of innovative, intelligent talent that Ghost had to offer.

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In essence, I had lost touch with the human side of things.

Not unlike Geralt, who in the lore of the Witcher games had to go through extensive training to make him the badass he is, although he loses touch with his human side, like emotions, and the ability to sleep, along the way. In the lore of the games, Witchers are not liked by humans because they're honestly a bit weird. So you can see the similarities growing between me and Geralt.

So you can imagine my surprise when Rach messaged me with what the actual writeup needed to include, and it was actually really simple and low pressure. The point wasn't to aggrandise Ghost to faceless potential clients, but to show how much Ghost cares about its people.

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You can always go back to the main menu

Obviously, this is not my amazing Medium thinkpiece, and that's fine. I've learned that in life, and at Ghost, I can always save and restart.

While playing the game, I was trying to jump off some rocks, realised Geralt would probably take a lot of damage from the fall, and quickly tried to swivel mid-air. This ended up with me getting stuck for 10 minutes. I was actually nervous to exit to the menu and start again at that point, because I thought I would just end up being in the same place, stuck literally between rocks and a hard place, and I'd have to restart the whole game.

But, I suppose the developers of this game were smarter than that, because when I finally bit the bullet and exited the game, returned the main menu, and opened up my save, it actually sent me back to the point before I jumped, and I could continue playing with basically no repercussions.

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You will know when you're at the point of no return

At certain points in games, it's common to see a message like this, generally when you're about to enter the endgame. It's the game giving you a chance explore a little bit of more of the world, build up some supplies, make sure all your other side quests are done, and basically make sure you're prepared for the final act of the game.

So I had actually run out of official Playtime, because I had spent the last two hours I had trying to outline my amazing Medium thinkpiece. I basically thought that was it for me.

Don’t fight bears when you're level 17

When I came across that cutoff point, I had a few quests left in my log and I wasn't sure which ones would be affected. My immediate idea was to try and finish off all these little side quests. To quickly summarise, you can basically win extra money by participating in fist fights, I dunno, it's set in the medieval times.

I guess I thought because Geralt is like, super strong and has magic powers that completing this level 30 fight would be a breeze, even though my Geralt at the time was only level 17. So I attempted the quest, went over to the little marker on the map, and it turned out this 'fistfighter' was a bear, which the devs probably put in for some lighthearted worldbuilding.

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Anyway, I spent around an hour trying to fight this bear and died every time. You get potions and different foods in the game to help you heal and get different skill boosts, and I consumed a majority of them.

In the end I had to admit defeat, and cross that very clear point of no return with basically no supplies. As it turns out, that quest wasn't even affected by the point of no return - because it would be silly for the game designers to assume someone who's at this specific point in the story could have taken on a level 30 quest at this time.

And it was silly for me to assume as well.