The Just Cause games were the ultimate destruction sandbox games. Anything that’s red can be blown up, and Avalanche Studios made four games based on that principle. Unfortunately, the studio shuttered before we could get a fifth game or could put out the game it was working on at the time, Contraband. However, it’s another of the studio’s earlier planned games that we’re going to talk about today.
Out of all the studio’s canceled projects, former CCO Christofer Sundberg claims AionGuard was the one that stung the most. Perhaps the old wound has begun to sting again because Sundberg claims the medieval fantasy game was a lot like the recently launched and highly popular Crimson Desert.
AionGuard’s Cancellation Hit Avalanche COO The Hardest
Ambitious games getting canceled has become commonplace in the industry today, but Sundberg believes AionGuard had all the ingredients to be successful as it “would have been Crimson Desert”. In an interview with PC Gamer, he said that a lot of the game’s features are similar to Pearl Abyss’ game.
“It was exactly that. I haven’t played Crimson Desert enough, but we had everything that I’ve seen from Crimson Desert in the plans for that game,” he said. “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.”
AionGuard was pitched as a sort of medieval Just Cause, where you play a sorcerer-knight tasked with taking back the kingdom by destroying enemy strongholds. However, it included a lot more features, which Sundberg claims he sees in Crimson Desert today. However, considering how many features are crammed into Pearl Abyss’ game, it isn’t clear which features he’s talking about exactly.
An open world sandbox where you can take over territories in any way you like sounds pretty generic now, but Avalanche planned to launch the game for the PS3 and Xbox 360.
- Released
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March 19, 2026
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood, Drug Reference, Intense Violence, Strong Language
- Developer(s)
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Pearl Abyss
- Publisher(s)
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Pearl Abyss
