One of the most striking early sequences in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty is its Chimera Tank boss fight, in which V and President Myers battle an enormous, Ghost in the Shell-inspired spider-tank in the bowels of a Barghest facility. The battle forms the explosive culmination of Phantom Liberty’s opening act, and CD Projekt recently revealed just what it took to get the sequence where they wanted it.
Speaking on CD Projekt’s official AnsweRED podcast (via Eurogamer), Phantom Liberty’s game director Gabe Amatangelo, and creative director Igor Sarzyński discussed various production challenges the studio faced during Cyberpunk 2077’s creation, bringing up the Chimera Tank as an example. “Sometimes we’re making content that’s a nexus point of different disciplines, the Chimera is a great example of that,” Amatangelo said. “It was gameplay, narrative, art, worldbuilding.”
Amatangelo explained that CD Projekt wanted the Chimera Tank to “terrify” players with its weapons, and that there were “so many moving parts” to balance appropriately for the sequence to work. “Sometimes it was too gameplay [focussed], sometimes it was too narrative, sometimes too art direction. It was about striking a balance and I think the three of us got into it and went: ‘Okay, beat-by-beat, let’s do this.'”
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According to Paweł Mielniczuk, Phantom Liberty’s art director and the podcast’s co-host, creating the boss fight was a years-long process. “I think when we were iterating, it was two years to make this boss fight work,” he explained. Later in the chat, Mielniczuk stated the tank went through “four” different iterations that involved “changing equipment [and] the weapons”, while Sarzyński claimed that the Chimera’s construction represents “one of the most expensive art assets I think ever.”
It’s interesting to hear CD Projekt discuss the encounter’s development, especially since, when I played it around Phantom Liberty’s launch, I thought it would have benefited from slightly more balancing. Slowly blasting it to bits was one of the more gruelling parts of Phantom Liberty, and reminded me a lot of the unexpectedly punishing battle with The Toad Prince in The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone.
Nonetheless, fighting the Chimera Tank is certainly memorable, while Phantom Liberty more broadly is one of the best things I’ve played this decade. I’m keen to see how CDP takes all the lessons it’s learned making Cyberpunk into the sequel, though we’ve got several years, a Witcher 3 expansion, and The Witcher 4 to come before we see it.
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