‘We Had Everything from Crimson Desert’: Just Cause Dev Recalls Cancelled Fantasy Game

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The recent excitement around Crimson Desert has led Christofer Sundberg, a co-founder of Avalanche Studios, to discuss his former team’s earlier work.

The project, called AionGuard, was an older game developed during the PlayStation 3 era. According to Sundberg, it shared many similarities with the open-world game created by Pearl Abyss.

I haven’t spent a lot of time with Crimson Desert yet, but everything I’ve seen in that game was already part of our plans for our own project,” he explained to PC Gamer.

It might seem like a bit of an exaggeration to compare it to older games, considering how advanced Crimson Desert appears, but it’s important to remember that the game’s developer, Avalanche, also created the Just Cause series. Both franchises offer players a lot of freedom to explore and cause chaos in an open world, so there’s some overlap in their gameplay styles.

Despite being cancelled after about two years of work, Sundberg believes AionGuard would have been successful.

He remembers thinking at the time that their announcement meant no competitor could replicate what they’d created. The team had a working version of the project even before they presented it to potential publishers.

Sadly, no one was willing to take AionGuard on after its initial publishing deal fell through.

Sundberg explained that they initially signed a deal with a major publisher known for popular franchises. However, the publisher shifted its strategy to concentrate on its established properties rather than taking on new ones. He was particularly upset by the fact that they ended the partnership with a simple text message, something he says he’ll never get over.

As PC Gamer notes, AionGuard was once highly anticipated, even landing a nine-page feature story on the cover of EDGE magazine in 2009, where it was hailed as the next major hit.

Despite all the media coverage, the game still couldn’t be saved without a publisher willing to back it. Sundberg explains that many of the AionGuard team were then shifted to work on a related project called Arcadia Rising – a game with a more straightforward story, but still set in a large, explorable world, this time in an alternate steampunk version of London.

Unfortunately, the game never fully materialized due to financial difficulties at its publisher, THQ. Designer Sundberg and his team still consider ‘Arcadia Rising’ a promising project that was worth pursuing.

It would have been fascinating to see how AionGuard might have performed in the late 2000s. It likely would have gained attention before popular games like Skyrim, and if it truly resembled Crimson Desert, it could have been considered a standout title.

Have you heard of AionGuard before? Climb atop a dragon and fly it into the comments section below.

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2026-04-08 18:07