If Crimson Desert has proven one thing, it's that a lot of people love complete freedom in their video games. The ability to look at a mountain and say "I want to climb that" and then go do that exact thing is pretty powerful, and apparently Avalanche was working on a game to capitalise on that feeling long before Crimson Desert came about.
Speaking to PC Gamer, Avalanche chief creative officer and co-founder Christofer Sundberg said that AionGuard, the fantasy game the Swedish studio was working on in the late 2000s, would have been exactly like Crimson Desert. "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.
By the sounds of it, the game would have operated like a fantasy Just Cause. You are plopped down in a world that needs retaking/saving, and can go about destroying and capturing enemy bases as you see fit. However, the project wasn't to be, as the publisher at the time pulled out.
"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," Sundberg said.