After its huge success, Blizzard Entertainment's first-person shooter video game "Overwatch" was supposed to have a graphic novel titled "Overwatch: First Strike". Unfortunately, it was announced that Blizzard will no longer continue with the new project.
"While we are grateful to the team for the fantastic work they put into it, we've ultimately decided to take the story in a different direction," said Michael Chu, the lead writer of Overwatch, on the Battle Net blog. "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. 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," he said, according to eurogamer.net.
As stated in an article by CinemaBlend, though the game's market sale came off as a huge success, it is still not popular enough to warrant its side projects, like the graphic novel about the story of the first Overwatch strike team. The proposed graphic novel "Overwatch: First Strike" was being written by Mickey Nielsen, Blizzard Entertainment's writer and graphic novel scribe, and being illustrated by Ludo Lullabi.
Despite the cancellation of the graphic novel, Michael Chu is still steadfast that Blizzard will soon plan to expand more on the game's story, one way or the other. "So for now the early adventures of Gabriel Reyes, Jack Morrison, Ana Amari, Reinhardt Wilhelm, Torbjörn Lindholm (and more!) wait for another day. But we know that this is a story that you are excited about, and it's one we still plan to tell," said Chu.
