Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty: Chimera boss took CD Projekt Red about two years

Game director Gabe Amatangelo and creative director Igor Sarzyński said the fight took about two years to get working properly.
The studio said the Chimera brought together multiple disciplines, including gameplay, story, art, and worldbuilding.

What happened

CD Projekt Red looked back at the Chimera tank boss from Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty in an episode of the official AnsweRED podcast. Game director Gabe Amatangelo and creative director Igor Sarzyński explained how difficult it was to finish the encounter. The discussion focused on how the tank had to function within a mission that needed to be technically, narratively, and visually convincing at the same time.

According to the pair, it took about two years before the Chimera sequence worked properly. Amatangelo described the tank as a part where gameplay, narrative, art, and worldbuilding all came together, which meant the teams had to spend a lot of time aligning their work. In the source material, that combination is explicitly cited as the reason the encounter could not be finished in a single development pass and had to be adjusted repeatedly.

It also emerged that the Chimera was reworked several times. Developer Paweł Mielniczuk said the tank was effectively done four times, with changes made to its equipment and weapons among other things. The source also notes that the Chimera was discussed in the podcast as a very expensive art asset, although no exact financial breakdown is provided in the supplied information. As a result, the only clear takeaway is that the asset required an unusually large amount of production effort.

The podcast discussion fits into a broader retrospective on Phantom Liberty’s production, where CD Projekt Red has often explained how individual parts of the expansion came together. In this case, the focus was on the Chimera as a boss encounter that had to work not just as a fight, but also as part of Cyberpunk 2077’s presentation and world. The source directly links that complexity to the long development time and the tank’s repeated iterations.

Timeline

2026-09-25: Eurogamer publishes an article about CD Projekt Red’s discussion of the Chimera tank in the official AnsweRED podcast.
2026-09-25: Gabe Amatangelo and Igor Sarzyński say it took about two years to get the Chimera fight working properly, with gameplay, narrative, art, and worldbuilding needing to be aligned.
2026-09-25: Paweł Mielniczuk explains that the tank was reworked multiple times, including changes to equipment and weapons, and that the Chimera was effectively done four times.
2026-09-25: The source says the Chimera was also presented in the podcast as a very expensive art asset, but without further financial details.

Background

The Chimera is one of the boss encounters in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and appears in the expansion as a large tank-like enemy. In the supplied source, the fight is framed as a technically and creatively difficult part of the mission structure. That is partly because the encounter was not isolated to one discipline, but instead formed a crossroads of gameplay, story, art, and worldbuilding, according to Amatangelo.

The source also describes the Chimera as a very expensive art asset. That wording is not expanded with figures, budgets, or comparisons to other assets in the supplied information, so nothing more specific can be added on that point. What is clear is that the podcast discussion presents the tank as a production element that required far more work than a standard boss fight.

The repeated iterations are the second major part of the background. Mielniczuk said the tank was done four times, with changes made to its equipment and weapons. That suggests the encounter was not only visually refined, but also revisited in terms of design until the combination of combat and presentation felt right. The source does not provide a full breakdown of every version, but it does confirm that development went through multiple revision rounds.

The timing of the publication is also relevant: Eurogamer published the article on 25 September 2026, based on an episode of CD Projekt Red’s official AnsweRED podcast. In the supplied context, that podcast serves as the primary source for the comments from Amatangelo, Sarzyński, and Mielniczuk. So the core of the story is not a rumor or a stray quote, but a direct retrospective from the developers themselves on a specific part of Phantom Liberty.