Avalanche Studios, the Swedish dev team behind the Just Cause series and 2015’s Mad Max, has been forced to cancel almost as many games as it’s actually ended up releasing. However, according to co-founder and former CCO Christofer Sundberg, the studio’s WW1/medieval/fantasy game AionGuard is the cancellation that still stings the most.
Sundberg recently sat down for an interview with PC Gamer to discuss his time at Avalanche Studios, which he left in 2019, and his upcoming game Samson, developed and published by Liquid Swords. Based on the interview, though, it seems Sundberg was at least as interested in less interested in giving an unnamed publisher the middle finger for cancelling AionGuard in 2009 as he was in promoting his new game.
“I haven’t played Crimson Desert enough, but we had everything that I’ve seen from Crimson Desert in the plans for that game,” Sundberg revealed. “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.”
Targeting PS3, Xbox 360, and PS3, AionGuard was an open-world fantasy game. As Luke Plunkett wrote for Kotaku in January of 2009, “You play a member of the AionGuard, valiant magic knight types who survive the end of the world and set about retaking said world. That means taking it back from the bad guys, region by region, with each region controlled by an enemy stronghold that has to be taken down. Because the game’s open world, however, you can do this however you like. You can run straight in and kill everything, or sneak around disrupting supply lines to weaken the base, or even enlist the help of local tribes. Whichever you like.”
Even after buying the rights to AionGuard back in 2009, Sundberg explained that the game never saw the light of day because “every publisher just shut the door, because it was already announced.” This is because Avalanche Studios had opted to announce AionGuard through an EDGE Magazine cover spread in January 2009.
Whether or not the game would have ended up being Crimson Desert before Crimson Desert is a question that will have to go unanswered, as the only things to have survived AionGuard’s cancellation are a handful of low-res screenshots.
