Metacritic Responds to Ongoing Dragon Age: The Veilguard Review Bombing Campaign

Dragon Age: The Veilguard has been out in the wild for a few days, but the furore surrounding BioWare's latest continues unabated. Review aggregate site Metacritic has spoken out in response to the wave of low-effort, negative user reviews, which are at odds with both the game's critical reception and user reviews on Steam, where, you know, you actually have to have bought the game.

Eurogamer waded into the morass, noting that The Veilguard currently has a 3.8 out of 10 user score, compared to an 84 on the critic side. Many of the game's recent 0 out of 10, barely legible user reviews consistently feature buzzwords like "woke," "psyop," and "censorship", which makes us doubtful of the author's ability to make critical assessments. Contrasting this, over on Steam, The Veilguard enjoys a Mostly Positive rating from over 13,000 user reviews, a stark difference.

Metacritic didn't offer meaningful solutions, providing Eurogamer with what sounds like a stock response: "We take online trust and safety very seriously across all our sites, including Metacritic. 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." Metacritic encountered a similar situation following the release of Horizon Forbidden West last year.