Two years. One boss fight. CD Projekt Red has been talking about the Chimera tank sequence in Phantom Liberty, and the number that keeps coming up is the time spent getting it to work: roughly two years of, in the studio’s words, iterating over and over. The tank itself is described as one of the most expensive art assets the studio has ever produced.
If you played it, you probably remember the shape of it. A hulking mech-tank stalking you through a set piece, all spectacle and noise, before it eventually parks itself in one spot so you can finally kill it. Flashy on the way in. A bit of a shooting gallery on the way out.
Why the hard part isn’t the tank
The art asset is expensive, sure, but expensive art is a solved problem at a studio like this one. You throw people and time at it and you get a beautiful machine. What you can’t brute-force is the encounter design around it, and that’s where two years goes.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a first-person RPG where the player might show up as a netrunner, a stealth build, a shotgun bruiser, a katana lunatic, or someone who dumped everything into cyberware and forgot to pick a weapon. A boss fight has to be legible to all of them. It has to telegraph in first person, where your field of view is narrow and a giant thing behind you is functionally invisible. It has to survive a player who quickhacks it from a rooftop and one who runs straight at it. Every one of those constraints eats iterations.
The genre’s track record here is not good. Cyberpunk’s own launch-era bosses were mostly forgettable damage sponges. Deus Ex: Human Revolution famously outsourced its boss fights and got arena encounters that punished exactly the builds the rest of the game encouraged. Immersive-sim-adjacent games keep running into the same wall: the systems that make the moment-to-moment great are the systems that make a scripted showdown fall apart.
The compromise is visible in the final fight
So the Chimera ends where it does. A chase, a spectacle, and then a stationary target. That final phase reads as the solution CDPR landed on after burning through the alternatives, a way to guarantee that every build gets a clean window to do its thing. It’s not elegant. It works.
The uncomfortable part of this story is the economics. Two years of design iteration plus a top-tier art budget, for one encounter in one expansion. Most studios cannot spend that. A lot of them will look at the Chimera, do the math, and conclude that the correct number of bespoke boss fights in their open-world RPG is zero.
CDPR is now building Cyberpunk 2 on Unreal Engine 5 rather than REDengine, with a new toolchain and a new set of physics and animation constraints. Whatever the team learned tuning the Chimera over those two years was learned inside an engine they’re no longer using.