/silly scene with a tripod that looks like an octopus/

You may ask why was it Kharkov and not some other place depicted on this first WoT map. My guess would be because the liberation of Kharkov on 23 Aug 1943 was the conclusion and the major result of the Kursk offensive.

When filming the scene, we discovered this memorial tablet saying /in Ukrainian/: “This house from 1934 to 1937 was the home to Konstantin Chelpan (1899 – 1937), the Head Constructor of T-34′s diesel engine. Repressed in 1937. Rehabilitated in 1956.” That diesel engine model was the famous V-2 that was later upgraded for IS and IS-3.

This is the other end of Chichibabin’s street and the base of the other team. In front of this base is the National Medical Institute, which in 1994 gained the university status. A lot of students from many countries are enrolled in this Institute to become a highly regarded specialist, but getting accepted takes a lot of effort. The building’s address is Lenin’s avenue, 4. That avenue also happens to be where I live.

Now this roof here is approximately at the spot where in game you can see the steep that goes down to the “field” (this is probably they will call the place where the Klotchkovskaya st. is now). This place is nothing special both in-game and in real life, just some malls and residential buildings.

Overall, the map is quite close to the real life, with some concessions to improve the gameplay. In my opinion, the introduction of historical locations will make the battles much more interesting due to the variety of options /of playing the maps/ and the spirit of WWII. I wish that WG keeps going forward with that path.

–end–

From the windows of the Main campus, one can see the Pasionaria’s Descent (named so after Dolores Ibárruri, a Spanish revolutionary). Above this street is the Zoological bridge – even though no one actually calls it this way, because it is full of padlocks placed there by sweetheart pairs (as a symbol of unity), which is why the bridge is usually called the Lovers bridge. I could not find anywhere a specific date when the bridge was built, only that it was built after 1953. One notable thing is that the map makers have given up some realism in this part of the map in favor of the gameplay by making the descent less steep.

Let us move on to the bottom left corner of the map. There is a prominent Klotchkovskaya street there, even though it looks quite different from the street nowadays. From Klotchkovskaya, you can get to the Novoivanovskiy bridge over Lopan river. Moving further, you get to the Southern railway station. Now do you have any guess what we see now in this footage? The street in front of us is called after Boris Chichibabin. But if I use my free camera to go higher up, you can see that we are… in the middle of the base circle. Notably, the other base is also situated on Chichibabin street, but on the opposite end of it, and you need to traverse quite a wide arc to get from one base to the other. Here I walk exactly over the base circle, but for some reason the capture bar is not showing up – I guess you need to be in a tank for that to work.

In front of SIB is the Freedom Square, or rather a part of it (it is not fully present in the game). You can see 3 buildings on the square. One of the buildings was unfinished at the time when the war started – that is the Northern campus of the Kharkov University. Earlier, this building was intended for the Military Academy named after Govorov. On the opposite side of the square from the Northern campus is the Main campus. Being a student of that same university, the first thing I did was… /shoots the Main campus/. It’s quite bizzare – the first time myself and a friend of mine got into this map on the test server, we agreed to meet “near the smoking place”, and we both found the place.

Of course, as a student of this university, I felt obliged to show you the interior of this building. I also wanted to film it from the roof, but was not allowed to. Still, there was nothing to prevent me from filming the interior.

The building was built in 1932 with the intention of using it as the government office of the Ukrainian SSR (Ukrainian Soviet Socialistic Republic), but the government was moved into Kiev, and the building was repurposed as a “house of projects”. The building was significantly damaged during the war, and you can see that the frontal part of the in-game building is somewhat different from the modern building. The building stood empty from 1941 to 1961 before it was fully reconstructed and handed over to the Kharkov University.

1.

We are in Kharkov, this video is about the map that comes out in 9.1 and this is the first map modeled after an existing city. Let us take a walk around the places that have any significance in the gameplay – where battles will commence – and also the places that are notable in real-life Kharkov.

A curious person will first thing open the city map to compare it to the in-game map. I found a German aerial photographic map of the city dated by Sept 16, 1941. When you put it next to the in-game minimap, the similarity is striking. It is really nice to see the precision, with which the map makers placed each building in its historic location.

Here is “GosProm” /SIB, State Industry Building; not to be confused with GasProm/. Its construction took 3 years and was finished in 1928. At that moment it was the highest skyscraper in the USSR – 63m. It is called the symbol of Constructivism. The building is one-piece reinforced concrete, a construction method which made it very sturdy. To see how much so, consider the fact that after 86 years and a world war, the building is still standing without any serious reconstruction. During the 4′th battle of Kharkov, in Aug. 1943, the Germans mined the building intending to blow it up, but an unknown person paid with their life to prevent the explosion. As a result, there was only a light fire that didn’t cause any harm. Three wings of the building are connected with 26-m corridors that oversee the streets named after French writers: Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse. Despite its historical significance, the SIB building will not be a major part of the gameplay, being placed in a corner of the map.

One question, what is the significance of the padlocks on the footbridge?

Seems to me that they are implementing this map in anticipation of future “historical” battle “Reconquest of Ukraine”…