Well before Just Cause developer Avalanche lost Contraband, a co-op heist game planned as a major Xbox release, to Microsoft's cascading cancellations, the studio had to abandon an open-world fantasy game known as AionGuard in the '00s. New comments from Avalanche co-founder and former CCO Christofer Sundberg suggest AionGuard could've looked an awful lot like Crimson Desert, the newly released open-world fantasy game from developer Pearl Abyss that's sold millions of copies in a few weeks.
Speaking with PC Gamer, Sundberg directly compares the two games: "I haven't played Crimson Desert enough, but we had everything that I've seen from Crimson Desert in the plans for that game."
AionGuard would've had dragon riding, elemental systems leaning on physics interactions like freezing and breaking ice, and transformations including towering golems, Sundberg says. Some of that might sound familiar if you've been running around Pearl Abyss' latest desert. (Black Desert, formerly Black Desert Online, is technically an MMO, but I found it could easily be enjoyed as a single-player RPG.)
Crimson Desert has drawn praise for its massive world and reactive sandbox – to many players, more than enough to make up for a weaker story and some pacing or balance issues – and it sounds like AionGuard was pursuing a similar shotgun blast of features years ago. In Sundberg's view, it outright "would have been Crimson Desert," he says, suggesting it could've played and been received very similarly. If it had indeed launched in the shape Sundberg describes, and in the late '00s or early '10s, I could imagine it making a splash.
The Lord of the Rings, particularly Helm's Deep, was apparently a major inspiration for AionGuard. The game even landed a publisher but that deal abruptly fell through when "they broke up with us on a text message, which I will never forgive them for," Sundberg says.
In the aftermath, with Avalanche unable to find a new publisher, the AionGuard team was moved onto a "more linear" steampunk game called Arcadia Rising, which was also doomed by the fickle world of finance under THQ. "We always talk about Arcadia Rising as one of those games that deserved to be made," Sundberg concludes.
