I still remember the first time I faced the Militech Chimera. It was 2025, and I had just downloaded the Phantom Liberty expansion, ready to dive back into Night City's neon-soaked chaos. What I didn't expect was that seven months later, the developers at CD Projekt Red would reveal the expansion's true grim reapers—not through some menacing new enemy design document, but through cold, hard player death statistics. As the data shows, our most formidable foes often aren't the ones with glowing optics and missile launchers; sometimes, they're our own wandering minds and the deceptive geometry of a crumbling parking garage.
The official kill tally, shared by CDPR over the past year, lays out the hierarchy of havoc in Dogtown. Topping the charts, predictably, are two mechanical nightmares:
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The Militech Chimera 🌪️: 3 million player lives extinguished. This multi-legged beast feels like fighting a symphony of industrial machinery that's decided you're a loose bolt needing removal.
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The Militech Cerberus 🔥: 2.9 million player lives claimed. This fight is a masterclass in tension, transforming the high-octane RPG into a claustrophobic survival horror segment more efficiently than a power outage in a meat locker.
What's fascinating is that the Cerberus isn't number one. Its encounter is infamous—a moment where V is stripped of their legendary arsenal and forced to hide, making the game's engine hum with a different, terrifying pitch. We all went in expecting chrome and gunfire; we got pulse-pounding stealth against a relentless hunter. Yet, for all its designed terror, it's still not the apex predator of Dogtown. That honor, bizarrely, goes to something far more mundane.
Here’s where the story takes a turn into the absurdly relatable. The bronze medalist, responsible for sending over 2.6 million Vs to an early grave, isn't a rogue AI or a cyberpsycho. It's us. Specifically, it's our collective inability to watch our step on the catwalks of the abandoned Kemper Stadium during the mission 'Dog Eat Dog'.
The Unseen Enemy: Gravity and Distraction
The mission leads you to a parking garage that has seen better days—a skeleton of concrete and rebar. The path involves:
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Traversing narrow I-beams that sway underfoot.
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Leaping across gaps that promise a long, fatal drop.
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Navigating tight platforms that vanish into shadow.
The design is intentional, evoking a sense of precarious height and decay. But the statistics scream a hilarious truth: millions of us, equipped with double-jump cyberware and air dashes that let us dance across skyscrapers, have simply... stepped off the edge. My own death there was like a haiku written by a distracted poet—a momentary lapse in thought followed by a sudden, silent punctuating drop. Was it curiosity, peering over the edge to see what loot might glint below? Was it the classic gaming instinct to test the boundaries of the level? Or was it just a moment of autopilot, a thumb twitch while our brain was elsewhere?
CDPR's data, current through early 2026, confirms this phenomenon. In a world of talking guns and mantis blades, the third-greatest killer in Phantom Liberty is ambient environmental hazard coupled with player oversight. It’s a humbling reminder of how game worlds, no matter how immersive, are still constructs with lethal edges. Our powerful in-game avatars are forever just one misjudged jump away from becoming a wet stain on the pavement, a fate as inevitable and ignoble as a dropped ice cream cone on a summer day.
| Rank | Killer | Player Deaths (Approx.) | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🥇 | Militech Chimera | 3,000,000 | Boss Enemy |
| 🥈 | Militech Cerberus | 2,900,000 | Boss Enemy / Horror Segment |
| 🥉 | Stadium Catwalk Falls | 2,600,000+ | Environmental Hazard / Player Error |
This leaderboard is more than just a fun fact. It's a commentary on our relationship with game spaces. We conquer designed challenges—the Chimera's artillery barrage, the Cerberus's searchlights—through skill, build-crafting, and persistence. But the open, exploratory spaces between those challenges? They claim their own tax. They ask for a different kind of attention: patience, observation, and a slight suppression of our impulsive, player-driven curiosity.
So, as I log back into Night City today, I look at Dogtown's skyline with new respect. The bosses I can learn. Their attack patterns are data to be processed. But the silent, gaping maw of a poorly lit chasm? That remains the wild card. Phantom Liberty's greatest lesson might just be to watch your step, because in 2026, even with all the chrome in the world, gravity remains the one fixer you can't negotiate with.