493 Words About: Finding a Pan in The Witcher 3
I’m positive this side quest was someone in the writer’s room originally being a troll, and then almost immediately uttering the sentences, “Guys, it was a joke! This is a Witcher videogame! We can’t make a side-quest about finding some old lady’s cooking pan!”
And then CD Projeckt Red did just that.
While Geralt is exploring the village of White Orchard, a yellow exclamation mark will appear on the map leading players to the home of an elderly woman who is peering inside, bemoaning the loss of her pan. This is an obvious side-quest and I could have ignored it, but I unironically enjoy side-quests so I spoke with her and watched her talk at Geralt for a solid five minutes straight. Apparently some strange man entered her home, spoke obsessively about her pan, and refused to leave, not but a few hours later another man came in, the woman was forced out of her home, the first man walked out an hour later, and the door remained locked behind him with an odor forming from the inside of the house.
The woman, to her credit, was only concerned with the loss of her pan.
This mission is easily, and quickly completed, and the player will find the woman’s pot resting on the counter, left visibly clean of any soot. Geralt concludes the soldier scrubbed all of it off to make ink for letters and returns it to the woman.
And that’s it.
That’s the quest.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt allows players the options to fight monsters like rotfiends, werewolves, griffins, cyclops, and ghouls just to name a few, all while exploring The Continent, a fantasy world based on the novels of Andrzej Sapowski. This game is rooted in slavic mythology and is considered by critics and players as one of the best open world fantasy videogames ever made, and it’s due in no small part to the complexity of its narrative. And that’s exactly why this side-quest about finding an old woman’s pan is so interesting.
A Frying Pan, Spick and Span is a reminder of the human element that goes into creating realistic human moments in videogames. Geralt is a Witcher, he fights monsters, and can employ magic. He is also a human being, moving and living among other human beings. While the great political and fantastic affairs ebb and flow around him, players get a true sense of his humanity as they watch him helping this woman just find a pan. There is a touch of politics to this quest that builds the larger narrative, since the soldier needed soot to create ink for his reconnaissance mission. But this only reinforces the mundane reality of common people living during times of war.
Geralt tells the old woman to bury the body after dark and not to inform any soldiers because he knows it will only lead to trouble.
It’s a small act of kindness to a woman in need.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
11.7.2024
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