Long before Crimson Desert captivated millions of players with its sweeping open-world adventure, the studio behind Just Cause was building something strikingly similar — and it nearly saw the light of day. Avalanche Studios co-founder and former chief creative officer Christofer Sundberg has revealed that a cancelled project called AionGuard shared a remarkable amount of DNA with Pearl Abyss’s recent hit, telling Rock Paper Shotgun and others that the studio “had everything that I’ve seen from Crimson Desert in the plans for that game.”
AionGuard was conceived as a fantasy-flavored spin on the Just Cause formula. Players would have taken on the role of a sorcerer-knight tasked with cleansing a vast open world of dark forces by liberating regions, capturing strongholds, and rallying local support. Instead of grappling hooks and wingsuits, the game offered dragon riding, the ability to transform into a towering golem, and a suite of other magical abilities — all set within a sprawling sandbox ripe for exploration and chaos.
The project had the backing of a major publisher, which Eurogamer notes was later confirmed to be Disney Interactive. However, after roughly two years of development, the partnership collapsed when Disney shifted its business strategy to focus on existing intellectual properties rather than new ventures. Sundberg recalls the split with undisguised bitterness: “They broke up with us on a text message, which I will never forgive them for.”
Left without financial backing, Avalanche made the fateful decision to publicly announce AionGuard on its own, hoping the reveal — which included a splashy feature in Edge Magazine back in 2009 — would attract a new publishing partner. The gamble backfired spectacularly. Rather than generating excitement among potential backers, the premature announcement scared them off. “Every publisher just shut the door, because it was already announced,” Sundberg explained, adding that the game had already been in a working state at the time.
With no path forward for AionGuard, the team pivoted to other projects, and the studio went on to produce additional Just Cause installments, the well-regarded Mad Max adaptation, and 2019’s Rage 2. An ambitious co-op title called Contraband was later announced in partnership with Xbox Game Studios but was also cancelled in 2025, continuing a pattern of promising Avalanche projects that never reached players.
Whether AionGuard would have truly rivaled Crimson Desert is impossible to know — the gaming landscape of the late 2000s was vastly different, and execution matters as much as ambition. Still, the story serves as a pointed reminder of how many potentially great games are lost not to a lack of talent or vision, but to the unpredictable currents of publishing politics and corporate strategy.