Review aggregation site Metacritic has spoken out in response to the ongoing review bombing of Dragon Age: The Veilguard by online commenters upset at the game's inclusive characters and themes.
BioWare's latest Dragon Age epic holds a "generally favourable" review average of 84 on Metacritic, based on a consensus of 54 critics' scores.
But the game's Metacritic user score is listed as just 3.8 out of 10, with a majority of user opinions falling in the starkly negative range. Looking at some of the most recent reviews at the time of writing, these include numerous scores of zero out of 10 for content in the game repeatedly described as "woke".
"Awful dialogue and obviously some woke agenda psyop," reads a zero out of 10 review from one user. "This is censorship at its worst."
"Woke kill the game," wrote another user who rated the game with a zero. "But gameplay is nice."
"This is what happens when you try to force push DEI [Diversity, equity, and inclusion] and sexual ideology in a fantasy game," wrote a third, who also scored the game with a zero.
Countless other examples are also visible, some of which include slurs and abuse we won't reproduce here. A number of commenters note they are leaving repeat responses as their earlier ratings have been deleted, presumably by Metacritic moderators.
By contrast, the 13,006 user reviews for Dragon Age: The Veilguard currently on Steam - which requires you actually play the game before leaving a review - are "Mostly Positive".
Dragon Age: The Veilguard features a companion character who identifies as non-binary, who the game's protagonist Rook can be supportive of. Rook themselves can also identify as transgender if the player chooses.
In a statement to Eurogamer acknowledging the backlash to Dragon Age: The Veilguard on its site, a spokesperson for Metacritic parent company Fandom said its site was a "place of belonging for all fans".
"We take online trust and safety very seriously across all our sites including Metacritic," the spokesperson said. "Metacritic has a moderation system in place to track violations of our terms of use. Our team reviews each and every report of abuse (including but not limited to racist, sexist, homophobic, insults to other users, etc) and if violations occur, the reviews are removed."
Last year, Fandom confirmed to Eurogamer it was "evolving [its] processes and tools to introduce stricter moderation" following similar reactions to Horizon Forbidden West's DLC, Burning Shores.
"It is the strongest and loudest answer BioWare could have mustered for the people still doubting whether it could do it," our Bertie wrote in Eurogamer's Dragon Age: The Veilguard review. "The answer is yes, emphatically. The Veilguard is spectacular. BioWare is back."
It's the first time they opened their eyes to the reality; that there are stories in BioWare games that don't cater to straight white dudes purely. This rustles their jimmies in a huge way, the outrage tourists and hate peddlers have been aggressive in the gaming space as most of their hateful audience has run out of steam. Looking for fresh anger and hate, they've been having a field day with gaming chuds.
It's odd that there is a quality issue with Veilguard's writing and voice direction, a lack of nuance and trusting their audience to get what's going on is present in a lot of the dialogue. Particularly, dialogue dealing with one's companions. I watched a video and was saddened to say that this Veilguard isn't for me. I still hope it does fine, granted, as I want BioWare to have a chance to course correct and get a better creative lead and writers onboard. Tell me all those 'woke' stories but with better writing!