Rather than write yet another article just about a game being review bombed on Metacritic, I wanted to write about how something really should be done to better curb this problem, which after all this time, still manages to be rather ridiculous.
The game in question this time is Horizon Forbidden West, namely the new Burning Shores DLC which has an 81 score from two dozen critics. The User Score, meanwhile is a 2.7/10.
While sometimes, a user score is a good indicator of a game being technically broken and upset players registered their anger that way, too often it is turned into a place to demonstrate hatred because of some specific “political” aspect of a game. And that’s what we’re seeing here.
The issue in question here is (spoilers for Burning Shores follow) that Aloy finally gets a romance, and can share a kiss with another woman, Seyka. Even though it was already established Aloy’s genetic ancestor Elisabet was a lesbian, this reveal still managed to surprise some “fans” who believe it’s “pandering” for PlayStation to reveal its second lead female as a lesbian (the first being Ellie from The Last of Us).
It’s true that Metacritic has taken some steps to curb this kind of review bombing. For instance, you can’t submit user reviews until a short while after the game is out, to prevent people who clearly have not bought or played the game from bombing it before releases or on day one. And while there may be some amount of moderation, there’s definitely not enough.
While I’m not going to post the comments in full, the “most helpful” comments listed under user reviews currently feature the following phrases for Burning Shores:
- “the gay agenda”
- “indoctrinated”
- “push the LGTB (sic) agenda”
- “ruined a great character”
- “focus on the story, not the propaganda”
- “they make aloy lesbian wtf!!”
- “sick people”
- “woke propaganda”
I could go on, and on, and on, but you get the idea. And these are literally the top featured reviews! While deleting this comments may be deemed a violation of “free speech,” Metacritic is, like all websites, a private entity and they can do whatever they want. And if they do erase some hateful comments, they sure are leaving a whole lot of them up for an extremely long time. I’ve seen fans at least sometimes mask their hate of a games politics by attempting to say the game itself is bad (even if it isn’t), but here we are just seeing…unbridled homophobia.
I absolutely do not believe that most if any of these reviewers have actually played Burning Shores, but instead probably saw the two-minute kiss cutscene on Twitter and got mad about it. It’s hard to imagine many people liking the series and playing through two full games only to be shocked and appalled when Aloy finally kisses a woman in the DLC.
So, there are two things I think Metacritic can do here. The first is require even more verification for user reviews, be that by phone number, or what Rotten Tomatoes has recently done for movies, providing some sort of verification that you actually purchased a ticket. Or in this case, a game or DLC.
The second is better moderation, which may be the main thing. Yes, I understand that Metacritic may not have the biggest staff, but for a game that is clearly being bombed by homophobic or racist or transphobic players (who are probably not even playing) you should be able to clean that up better. It is not “censorship,” it is erasing extremely clear hatred, and again, likely from people who have not played the game at all.
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