CD Projekt Spent Two Years Designing Phantom Liberty’s Chimera Tank Boss—Here’s Why

CD Projekt Red has pulled back the curtain on one of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty’s most demanding sequences: the Chimera Tank boss fight. Speaking on the studio’s official AnsweRED podcast, game director Gabe Amatangelo and creative director Igor Sarzyński revealed that the encounter—where V and President Myers battle a massive, Ghost in the Shell-inspired spider-tank deep in a Barghest facility—consumed two years of development and required constant iteration across gameplay, narrative, art, and worldbuilding disciplines.

“Sometimes we’re making content that’s a nexus point of different disciplines, the Chimera is a great example of that,” Amatangelo said on the podcast. “It was gameplay, narrative, art, worldbuilding.” He explained that the team wanted the tank to “terrify” players with its arsenal and struggled to balance the many moving parts of the encounter. “Sometimes it was too gameplay [focussed], sometimes it was too narrative, sometimes too art direction. It was about striking a balance.”

Years of Refinement and Four Major Redesigns

According to Paweł Mielniczuk, Phantom Liberty’s art director and podcast co-host, the boss fight’s two-year development cycle involved extensive reworking. “I think when we were iterating, it was two years to make this boss fight work,” Mielniczuk explained. The tank itself went through four distinct iterations that included “changing equipment [and] the weapons,” he added. Creative director Sarzyński underscored the scale of the effort, calling the Chimera’s construction “one of the most expensive art assets I think ever.”

The Chimera Tank serves as the explosive climax of Phantom Liberty’s opening act, making it a narrative and visual anchor for the expansion. Its prominence in the story and demanding technical scope explain why CD Projekt invested such significant resources into refining every beat of the encounter across multiple disciplines.

Why it matters

For players jumping into Phantom Liberty, the Chimera Tank fight represents one of the expansion’s signature set pieces—a showcase of what two years of iterative design and substantial art investment looks like in practice. The encounter stands as a high-stakes narrative moment, so understanding the effort behind it contextualizes both its ambition and its place in the expansion’s opening hours. Players expecting a standard boss battle should prepare for a mechanically complex, visually elaborate fight.

The revelation also signals how CD Projekt approaches resource allocation on prestige moments: when a sequence serves both story and gameplay, the studio is willing to commit years of cross-disciplinary work to get it right. For those playing Phantom Liberty or considering it, the Chimera Tank is worth approaching as a designed centerpiece rather than a routine encounter.