CD PROJEKT RED made Night City. Tens of thousands of buildings, adverts, awnings and bits of pavement litter, a lot of it placed by hand. So when someone at that studio calls one object one of the most expensive art assets ever made there, it is worth asking what an object has to be to earn that.
The object is the Chimera, the spider tank V and President Myers fight in the bowels of a Barghest facility early in Phantom Liberty. Game director Gabe Amatangelo, creative director Igor Sarzyński and art director Paweł Mielniczuk went through its development on the studio’s own AnsweRED podcast, and the figure that travelled everywhere on 28 September 2026 was this: roughly two years, and four rebuilds. The studio’s phrase for it was iterating over and over. The two-year estimate is attributed to Mielniczuk.
The rebuilds were driven by the tank’s equipment and weapons changing.
That sentence is short and it is doing more work than it looks like it is doing.
Why a boss costs more than a district
An environment artist builds to be reused. A kit of wall panels, a set of railings, a family of vending machines — every piece is made once and dressed a hundred times, and the cost per appearance falls the whole way through production. That economy is the only reason an open world is affordable at all. CD PROJEKT RED pushed it hard enough that the studio’s environment art director says Night City runs at twice The Witcher 3’s texel density — the budget went into resolution on surfaces the player stands two feet from, because first person puts you there.
A boss inverts every part of that. The Chimera appears once. It is never re-dressed, never instanced across a district, never seen again from a different angle in a later mission. Whatever it costs, it costs for one fight.
Getting a spider tank through modelling is a hard week for a good hard-surface artist. The two years live in everything hanging off the model. A walker of that size needs a rig with a leg IK setup that holds up on uneven floor, animation for every weapon it carries, destruction states for the parts the player is meant to shoot off, VFX per weapon, audio per weapon, collision that does not let the player stand somewhere the attacks cannot reach, and navigation that keeps a very large thing from getting stuck on a very small thing.
Change the weapons and you change all of it.
That is what four rebuilds means: four passes down a chain where each discipline waits on the one upstream, and where the designers asking for a different gun are asking, without meaning to, for a different animation set, a different VFX pass, a different mix, and a fresh round of encounter balancing to find out whether the new thing is still frightening.
Telegraphing to a camera with no body in it
Amatangelo described the Chimera as a nexus point — gameplay, narrative, art, worldbuilding, all meeting on one encounter. The art half of that is harder in Cyberpunk than it would be in most games with bosses, for a reason that has nothing to do with fidelity.
Cyberpunk is first person. The player cannot see V. There is no third-person silhouette to read distance against, no camera pulling back to frame the arena, no dodge animation the player watches themselves perform. Everything the player knows about an incoming attack has to arrive through the boss itself: a turret rotating, a leg planting, a light changing colour, a sound with enough directional information to mean something in a concrete room.
So the tank’s read is the fight’s interface. Move a weapon to a different hardpoint and the tell moves with it, which means the animation that sells the wind-up has to be re-authored, and the timing that gives the player their window has to be re-tuned against it. A third-person game absorbs that change more cheaply, because the camera is doing some of the communicating. Here the art is doing all of it.
The thing Cyberpunk was never built to do
There is context behind the two years that nobody on the podcast had to say out loud. Cyberpunk 2077’s original bosses were the weakest part of it. Adam Smasher, Oda, Sasquatch — encounters that asked a sandbox shooter-RPG to behave like a game with arenas, and got bullet sponges instead. The systems underneath were built for a city where the player picks their own approach, and a boss is the one moment where the game takes that choice back.
Phantom Liberty opened with one anyway, and spent its most expensive asset on the thing you meet on the way in.
Two years of rebuilding starts to look like a studio finding out, slowly, what its own engine would let a boss be. You cannot design that on paper. You build the tank, put it in the room, watch it fail to be frightening, and change the guns.
The expensive order to do it in, though, is exactly this one. Art committed before the encounter has settled is art that gets rebuilt, and four is a lot of rebuilds to absorb. Studios pay that bill in different ways — Eclipse Glow Games built a full-scale cathedral just to run a hands-on demo, which is the same arithmetic in a different direction: an enormous asset, one use, justified by what it proves rather than by what it amortises.
What makes the Chimera unusual is that CD PROJEKT RED said the number out loud. Most studios would rather you thought the boss arrived finished.