Back in the late 2000s, Just Cause developers Avalanche ended up in a publishing pickle with a fantasy open-worlder they were working on. It was dubbed AionGuard, and ex-Avalanche chief creative officer Christofer Sundberg reckons that had it not ended up chucked on the cancellation bonfire, the game would’ve done a lot of the same things which’ve helped make Crimson Desert a hit all these years later.

Sundberg is adamant of AionGuard’s red puddingness, telling Padded Coat Gamer that while he hasn’t played enough Crimson Desert to speak to everything in it, “we had everything that I’ve seen from Crimson Desert in the plans for that game”.

AionGuard’s pitch was a fantasy take on Just Cause’s explosive liberation of a massive open world. You were a sorcerer-knight with an evil to defeat by capturing strongholds, cutting supply lines, and gathering support from locals. In lieu of the ability to fly about with a wingsuit or fling cars around using tension cables, you’d have a dragon to ride and be able to morph into a giant golem alongside other magical powers.

It certainly sounds like it’d share some of the power fantasy and endless potential for exploration which lies at the heart of Crimson Desert’s formula for success, and the Just Cause games definitely tap into a similar loop of simply letting you loose in a massive playground to find and get up to cool things. Whether that’s as enjoyable or memorable in the long run as a more focused open-world experience which leans more heavily on a top-notch story is another question, but I can see the comparison. So, as much as it might seem a bit of a stretch for any developer to claim that an old project they were never able to finish was just like a very popular game that’s just come out, this doesn’t strike me as a reach in that regard.

Whether there’d have been the same sort of rampant appetite among many players for a game of a Crimson Deserty nature back around 2009 is another question, and one I wasn’t plugged enough into the gaming matrix as a ten year old to be able to answer off the top of my head now.

Sadly, AionGuard ended up without a publisher after two years of work, following what Sundberg recalls as a financially-motivated breakup via text. It was then announced and became the subject of a big feature in Edge magazine, as Avalanche tried to drum up buzz around their idea that another publisher might see and want to run with. That backfired, with no moneypeople deciding the game was worth a punt. AionGuard’s team ended up working on another new game Avalanche had in the works, an open-world adventure in steampunk London called Arcardia Rising, which ended up meeting a similar fate a few years on.

Sundberg’s since left Avalanche, with his new studio Liquid Swords releasing gritty urban brawler Samson today, April 8th.