The titanic Crimson Desert could have had a serious competitor in the West, but no publisher wanted to finance the project considered too ambitious by its studio.
Although perfectible and quite hollow from a narrative point of view, Crimson Desert will definitely have been able to speak to players looking for great adventures in a gigantic sandbox. However, it took seven long years for Pearl Abyss to complete this extremely ambitious project, which therefore represented a colossal investment of time and money. Via a recent interview with the co-founder of a well-known Western studio, we learned that a local equivalent was under study, but unfortunately nipped in the bud due to lack of funding.
The equivalent of a Western Crimson Desert lost under an avalanche of rejections by publishers
Nowadays, open world games are commonplace, to the point of having generated a certain weariness towards them. But ambitious, massive games like Crimson Desert are a sort of exception that proves the rule, offering a huge sandbox full of activities and mysteries that can keep even the most dedicated explorers occupied for hundreds of hours. But such a huge project is clearly not an easy task and requires an enormous amount of time and money.
This is what he would have learned the hard way Avalanche Studios (Just Cause), which, according to its co-founder Christopher Sundberghad in mind a new adventure game in a massive open world quite similar to Crimson Desert. In an interview with PC Gamerhe confided that “ we had everything i saw in this game for our own project », baptized AionGuardand « dream fantasy open world game » presented with great fanfare many years ago, since it dates back 2009.
Perhaps too ambitious compared to the technologies of the time, this Western equivalent of Crimson Desert before its time ultimately never saw the light of day, Avalanche having experienced numerous disappointments with this project. “ We had an agreement with a big publisher with plenty of licenses. But they wanted to focus on that and cut ties with us by message, I will never forgive them for that. Then, we wanted to announce our game on our side, which put a damper on all the publishers who closed the door to us because it had already been announced. And so the game died silently “. Given the proven success of Crimson Desert, despite its imperfections, perhaps Western publishers will now be more receptive to an equivalent project. The future will tell us.
Source : PC Gamer
