Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty's Chimera boss took two years and countless redesigns to get right

The Chimera tank boss fight in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty — the Ghost in the Shell-style mechanical monster that opens the DLC with a thunderous chase sequence — took two full years of development to get right, according to the people who made it.

Game director Gabe Amatangelo, creative director Igor Sarzyński, and art director Paweł Mielniczuk all discussed the fight on CD Projekt Red's AnsweRED Podcast. Mielniczuk, who hosted the episode, was blunt about the timeline: "We were iterating — I think it was two years to make this boss fight work. We were reiterating over and over." Amatangelo described the Chimera as "a nexus point of different disciplines" — gameplay, narrative, art, and worldbuilding all had to pull in the same direction simultaneously. He and Mielniczuk were apparently swapping YouTube videos of military miniguns just to nail the sound design. "When this Chimera rises up, we just want it to terrify you with this overwhelming sound," Amatangelo said. The tank itself was rebuilt roughly four times, with weapons and equipment swapped out each time. Sarzyński called it "one of the most expensive art assets I think ever."

Phantom Liberty launched in September 2023 as the only major expansion for Cyberpunk 2077, set in the new Dogtown district and built around a spy-thriller storyline. CD Projekt Red had already spent years rebuilding the base game's reputation after its disastrous 2020 launch, and Phantom Liberty was widely seen as the studio's chance to show what the game could be at its best. A boss fight of that scale — cinematic, multi-discipline, technically demanding — fits that ambition, even if the execution is debatable.

The Rock Paper Shotgun writer covering the podcast is candid that the end result doesn't fully justify the effort: the lead-up looks spectacular but leaves the player mostly passive, and the actual fight arena is fairly static. That's a fair criticism — two years of iteration clearly went into making the Chimera look and sound terrifying, but whether the fight mechanics match the spectacle is another question entirely.