You might be forgiven if you’ve forgotten all about AionGuard, which had been in development over at Avalanche for quite while before eventually fading away into the background. But with Crimson Desert being what it is, former Chief Creative Officer Christofer Sundberg (who’s now working on Samson) spoke about similarities between the two titles to PC Gamer.
When asked about AionGuard, he expressed regret over its troubled development cycle and even said that it could have achieved what Crimson Desert has managed, and done it a long time ago. “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 was touted as a pretty ambitious game back in the day, putting us in the shoes of a knight-sorcerer with a wide arsenal of abilities and the ability to recruit locals to his cause or even sabotage enemies in various ways (similar to the Just Cause franchise). It could have been a fantasy that unfolded very well, although hindsight tells us that it couldn’t hope to achieve Pywel’s visual splendor on the generation of gaming hardware it was being made for. And yet, Sundberg’s words make it sound like a wasted opportunity to push the boundaries of gaming quite early, and he was discontent at how Avalanche was forced to pull the plug on a project that it was clearly passionate about.
“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. They broke up with us on a text message, which I will never forgive them for.”
Alas, AionGuard has crawled so that Crimson Desert could fly. We’d say it’s better late than never as far as games with ambitious ideas are concerned.