Crimson Desert has obviously made a colossal splash recently, and that's prompted Avalanche co-founder Christofer Sundberg speak up on his former studio's old project.
Said project was called AionGuard, which you may have heard of back in the day. This thing was in development during the PS3 generation, and Sundberg reckons it had a lot in common with Pearl Abyss' open world epic.
"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 tells PC Gamer.
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Of course, that comment comes across as a bit of a stretch given just how ambitious and 'next-gen' Crimson Desert can feel, but it's worth remembering that Avalanche is behind the Just Cause games — and to some extent, those open world chaos simulators do cross paths with Crimson Desert in terms of player freedom.
Unfortunately, AionGuard was canned after roughly a couple of years in development, but Sundberg sounds convinced that it would have been a hit.
He recalls that his mindset at the time was: "What we announced, no one else can do." What's more, the team "already had it working" when the project was pitched to publishers.
Sadly, no one was willing to take AionGuard on after its initial publishing deal fell through.
"It was signed with a big publisher that has a lot of famous IPs," Sundberg reveals. "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."
PC Gamer points out that in 2009, AionGuard actually nabbed the cover story in an issue of EDGE magazine, receiving a nine-page blowout on what was then framed as the next big thing.
But again, without a willing publisher, even all of this media attention couldn't save the game. Sundberg goes on to explain that much of AionGuard's team was moved over to a sort of similar project called Arcadia Rising — a "more linear but still open-world game set in an alternative steampunk London".
However, publisher THQ's financial situation ended that dream before it could really get off the ground, with Sundberg saying that he and his former colleagues "always talk about Arcadia Rising as one of those games that deserved to be made".
Naturally, it would have been interesting to see what kind of impact AionGuard could have had back in the late noughties. Presumably, it would have dropped ahead of trendsetters like Skyrim, and if it really did share DNA with something like Crimson Desert, it might have been held aloft as something special.
Have you heard of AionGuard before? Climb atop a dragon and fly it into the comments section below.