One of the best things about Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, along with its great characters, systems-driven and often emergent gameplay, and absorbing story, is that its stunning world can be explored in real life. Warhorse’s meticulously detailed recreation of 15th century Bohemia features entire cities, towns, monuments, and landmarks mapped from real-life locations you can visit yourself. But if a ticket to Prague is a little out of your budget right now, or you just want to see for yourself how faithful Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s Kuttenberg region is to real life, you’d do well to check out this incredible interactive 3D map comparing the in-game locations to their real world counterparts.
KingdomCompare is a website letting you explore side-by-side 3D panoramas featuring actual photographs taken by an uncredited Kingdom Come super fan next to full 360 images of the same place as seen in the game, and it has Warhorse’s official stamp of approval. The map lets you click and drag the pointer to fully explore your surroundings and see your favorite spots in the game as they exist in real life. They’re even more similar to each other than I would’ve expected even as a massive fan of the game who’s spent more than 200 hours exploring Kuttenberg and Trosky. Here’s a video representation of what it’s like navigating KingdomCompare.
“I made this website to showcase the incredible attention to detail Warhorse put into recreating real locations from 600 years ago,” says the creator of KingdomCompare. “While planning my KCD trip last year I spent a few evenings with streetview on one monitor and KCD 1&2 on another. While that was fun I wished there was an easier way to do this. That’s how the idea for this website was born.”
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Naturally, Kingdom Come’s map isn’t an exact 1:1 replica of real-world historical locations, and the biggest disparity is in the space in between the main hubs. That’s because the actual geography had to be compressed down to a manageable size for a typical open-world game that doesn’t want you spending literal weeks traveling between cities.
“There also aren’t a lot of historical maps from this time available to use as reference and obviously a lot has changed in 600 years,” reads a section of the About page on KingdomCompare.com. “Some could definitley be aligned better than now but the process of doing one location is already quite long.”
Speaking of which, the process occurring behind-the-scenes here sounds incredibly arduous. Not even accounting for travel to and from Czechia, the creator of these maps says they’re hiking around the country “by foot” with the exception of “the few small villages in the northern part of the Kuttenberg region.”
“It’s totally doable and there are some nice routes for sure, but I’d say you can easily skip most of the smaller villages without missing anything,” they advise prospective travelers.
From there, the creator uses a specialized camera to record a full panorama of the site, edits out shadows and other people caught in the photo, and then finds the same location in-game. Using an Autohotkey script while in photo mode, they then capture 17 screenshots while rotating the camera, stich them together using another software called Hugin, and then align the rotation using a custom Blender template. Finally, they adjust colors to blend more seamlessly with the real-life pictures and use another script to make everything load cleanly in a browser. And clean, it is.
I’ve been having a blast clicking around all sorts of rural and urban areas from one of my favorite RPGs and exploring their real-life equivalents. Only the Kuttenberg region (which is huge) is complete at the moment, but the project will eventually include Trosky, the other half of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2’s map, as well as Sasau from the first game. Go on and explore. Audentes Fortuna iuvat!
