As a result of the recent DLC release for Horizon Forbidden West, which resulted in a wave of unfavorable review bombing, review aggregation website Metacritic has promised to enhance its moderation system. If you don’t want to discover some plot details from Burning Shores, stop reading this story right away.
An option for a same-gender kiss is included in the DLC in question, Burning Shores, as part of a plot between the heroine Aloy and a warrior queen named Sekya. This event is entirely voluntary, yet it seemed to attract a flood of keyboard warriors who had Google alerts set for the term “woke.”
Negative user reviews flooded the dedicated Burning Shores page, which is an all-too-common occurrence nowadays. Fandom, Metacritic’s parent business, has branded many of these evaluations as “abusive and disrespectful.” Remember that this is a minor voluntary event that only presents as an option for some players if they pursue preceding flirty dialogue choices.
Metacritic, according to fandom, “is a place of belonging for all fans” and takes “online trust and safety very seriously.” To that aim, corporate representatives state that they are “currently evolving our processes and tools” for review and content control. It has not made any particular modifications public. Meanwhile, Metacritic highlights what the current system is doing well.
In a statement to Eurogamer, Metacritic said: “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.”
Of course, this is not the first instance of review bombing to affect the platform, nor has Metacritic changed its policies to address the problem before. The aggregator was compelled to impose a 36-hour waiting period following a game’s release before opening up reviews to the wider public after The Last of Us Part II garnered an abundance of negative reviews for all-too-similar reasons. Similar actions were taken by Steam, where user reviews include the length of time the reviewer really spent playing the game. The adjustments made by Metacritic in 2020 evidently had no effect in this situation, so we’ll have to wait and see whether the firm has more specific steps to defend its platform.
