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Blizzard Entertainment has canceled the Overwatch graphic novel, First Strike, the developer announced in a blog post. Explaining the cancellation, Blizzard’s Michael Chu said, “We’ve ultimately decided to take the story in a different direction.”

“The original idea for the graphic novel dates back to the early days of the game’s development and came from our desire to tell the story of the founding of Overwatch during the Omnic Crisis,” he added. “In the years since First Strike‘s conception, we have done a lot of development on the universe and its stories. While the core of this story remains, we have changed and expanded upon how we see the events that took place during the first days of Overwatch.”

Chu teased that Blizzard plans to eventually tell the story of the early adventures of Overwatch’s main characters–but that’ll have to wait for “another day.”

“I’d like to thank everyone for the enthusiasm, passion, and support you’ve shown towards the Overwatch universe,” Chu added. “We have a number of stories in development that will delve deeper into the world and its heroes, and we can’t wait to share them with you in the coming months.”

Announced in July, First Strike was scheduled to come out in November 2016. It was described as a “brand-new entry in the Overwatch canon” and “will contain 100 pages of sequential artwork telling the story of the original Overwatch strike team.” It was going to be written by Micky Neilson and penciled by Ludo Lullabi.

In other news about Overwatch, the game is completely free to play on all consoles this weekend.

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Star Citizen has been in development for a long, long time now, as the original Kickstarter campaign began in October 2012. Pieces of the game have been released, but the full thing isn’t out yet. The game has grown in scope over the years, so the initial target release dates have come and gone. In a frank and candid blog post today, director Chris Roberts announced a major change for how the studio will communicate release dates, namely that the studio will share “target” dates that could change.

“Whether or not to share this kind of information has been a long running debate among the team here at Cloud Imperium Games,” Roberts said. “Target dates are not release dates, and everything you see will shift at some point, sometimes slightly and sometimes wildly. The danger in doing this has always been that casual observers will not understand this, that there will be an outcry about delays every time we update the page.

“We’ve taken stock, thought through everything and decided that, while that is a risk, above all we trust the community that has given us so much support,” he added. “The community that has let us focus our passions on this incredible project. You have allowed us to take this journey, you have tracked and followed so much of how game development works… and now we think it is right to further part the curtain and share with you our production process.”

Beginning with Star Citizen Alpha 2.6, Cloud Imperium will share its internal development schedule on a weekly basis. “These are the very same schedules we update daily and are circulated internally on our intra-studio hand-offs with a few exceptions: the individual developer names assigned to the tasks will be omitted (for obvious reasons), we’ll remove the JIRA details and we’ll modify the technical wording to make it readable for a wider audience, but otherwise, when something changes, slips or is completed, you will know,” Roberts went on to say.

Here is a sample of what the production chart will look like:

This schedule will be permanently posted on the Roberts Space Industries website; additionally, the developer will provide updates every week with a new “snapshot” of its internal schedule.

“We take the process of production very seriously and spend a lot of time on improving our ability in this area,” Roberts added. “Our worldwide Production Team is twenty-five strong and they are the backbone that drives our development forward. They work closely with developers to break down and create tasks, chase up task completion daily, update their respective team’s schedules, encourage and strengthen open communication by organizing meetings, agendas, and creating action items to help push the project forward day by day. The Production Team has many collective years with some of the biggest developers, publishers and games. They are like the rest of the CIG team, world class.”

Also in the blog post, Roberts spoke about how the studio has “take a lot of flak” over the years for pushing Star Citizen’s timeline further into the future.

“But the simple fact is that game development, especially game development on the scale of Star Citizen, is complicated. If you talk to any developer that works on large titles they will tell you that schedules, especially early in the development cycle, move all the time,” he said. “Most people never see this because a publisher won’t announce a project publicly until it is very far along; normally at least in Alpha, with all the technology and gameplay R&D completed. Even then, the timelines can be unpredictable as can be seen in the delays on big name titles from publishers.”

“Open development does have its drawbacks,” he added. “Not everyone understands the process or how difficult it can be. We have always tried to be open and share our progress. We refactored Around the Verse to focus more on developers showing and talking about their work to help give insight into the process. Our monthly reports have more information than any monthly report I had to do for Electronic Arts or Microsoft when at Origin or Digital Anvil.”

Star Citizen fans should really read the full blog post here from Roberts.

As alluded to, not everyone has been thrilled with Star Citizen’s delays. One backer recently received a refund after complaining to California’s Attorney General.

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As rumored, John Wick director David Leitch will direct the upcoming Deadpool sequel after Tim Miller dropped out amid “creative differences” with star Ryan Reynolds.

A report earlier this month named Leitch as the frontrunner to direct Deadpool 2, though at the time it was said that others were being considered as well. Variety reported today to confirm that Leitch has been officially named the director for the sequel.

Though Miller, who was instrumental in helping bring the massively successful Deadpool to theaters has dropped out of the sequel, original writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Rheese are still on board.

Commenting on Miller’s exit from the sequel, Reynolds said earlier this month, “All I can really add is that I’m sad to see him off the film. Tim’s brilliant and nobody worked harder on Deadpool than he did.”

Released in February, the R-rated Deadpool was a smash hit. It made $782 million at the worldwide box office against a budget of $58 million, according to Box Office Mojo.

In June 2016, Deadpool 2‘s script was nearing completion from Reese and Wernick, who are returning from the first film. The movie was at one time expected to start shooting in early 2017; a recent report claimed that production won’t begin until after January.

In other news about Deadpool, production company Fox is apparently already planning a third movie that will feature the X-Force. For more on Deadpool 2, check out GameSpot’s feature, “7 Things We Want to See in the Deadpool Sequel.”

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