Crimson Desert might not be everything we hoped it would be but it has undeniably found an audience and reminded everyone there’s still significant interest in sprawling open-world games. A studio that knows a thing or two about such projects is Avalanche, best known for the Just Cause series, and it turns out it had a similar game in the works.
At least that’s what Avalanche co-founder and former chief creative officer Christofer Sundberg told PC Gamer during a recent chat. “It was exactly that,” he said. “I haven’t played Crimson Desert enough, but we had everything that I’ve seen from Crimson Desert in the plans for that game.” He was talking about AionGuard, a long-forgotten title which even made it to Edge Magazine with a big reveal back in 2009.
The PC Gamer article describes AionGuard as “a fantasy open world fever dream” which had the player controlling a sorcerer-knight of sorts cleansing the land from evil while riding a dragon, and even becoming a giant golem. Just Cause DNA was felt throughout the game with a structure based on liberating regions and conquering strongholds to make progress in your campaign against the dark forces. Not every part of this shows up in Crimson Desert, but there’s an echo in the general idea and raw ambition of both games.
“It was signed with a big publisher that has a lot of famous IPs… And then they just changed business direction again and wanted to focus on their existing IPs instead of new ones,” Sundberg said. “They broke up with us on a text message, which I will never forgive them for.” And if you’re wondering who the ‘mystery’ publisher was, former Disney Interactive employee Martin Alltimes confirmed in 2024 to Time Extension that the company originally backed AionGuard.
As for what happened next, Avalanche decided to announce the game on its own, which unexpectedly caused the opposite of the intended effect: “Every publisher just shut the door, because it was already announced… We already had it working. And so that just died out silently.” In the end, Avalanche pushed onwards with more Just Cause and its underrated Mad Max game, among other projects.
The last project shipped by Avalanche was 2019’s Rage 2. Co-op sandbox game Contraband was in the works since at least early 2021 and set to be published by Xbox Game Studios, but it was cancelled last year.
