Despite enjoying widely positive critic scores, Dragon Age: The Veilguard‘s Metacritic user score has sunk to 3.8, or ‘generally unfavorable’, following an intense period of review bombing. Metacritic owner Fandom has now responded, noting that its user reviews are monitored and that offensive responses will be removed.
At the time of writing, Dragon Age: The Veilguard has an average critic score of 84 from 54 reviews of the PS5 version, landing it in the ‘generally favorable’ category. On Steam, 74% of 13,120 reviews are listed as positive, netting it a ‘mostly positive’ rating on Valve’s platform.
The latter, however, requires you to own the game to review it, whereas Metacritic doesn’t. This has led to over 4,775 user responses, of which 64% are listed as negative. Reviews criticize the RPG for being “woke,” with players targeting the game’s writing and narrative primarily, and its level design laterally.
In a statement to Eurogamer, Fandom has addressed the ongoing review bombing, noting that user responses are “moderated” and that anything that breaks the site’s code of conduct will be removed.
“We take online trust and safety very seriously across all our sites including Metacritic,” Fandom states. “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.”
Dragon Age: The Veilguard has been a decade in the making, and brings the world of Thedas to life in ways previous games never could. In my Dragon Age: The Veilguard preview from earlier this year, I praised its spectacular visuals and cast of fun fantasy characters but didn’t quite get on with its combat.
The game beat out Dragon Age: Inquisition’s Steam player count by 500% on launch day, and peaked at 89,418 concurrent players, making it one of EA’s biggest releases to date on Valve’s platform.
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