We’ve often shared the reviews and thoughts of certain critics and players on this site regarding new games coming out. We’ve also been careful to note that while review scores may skew to one side of the scale or the other, you, the player, are the only one who can truly say that something is “good or bad” based on your own experiences. There are numerous examples of “critically beloved games” not being as praised by fans and “average games” in critics’ eyes being fan favorites. Then, there are titles like Dragon Age The Veilguard, which is the latest victim of the event known as “review bombing.”
As we noted before, Dragon Age The Veilguard got its Metacritic score just before launch, and at this point, it’s at an 83. That’s not too bad, especially given past games from Bioware that didn’t even get that high for incredibly fair reasons. However, when you look at the user score, nearly 5000 players have come together to give it a score of just 3.8. That’s not good, but there is also context here, as Eurogamer notes that many of these reviews are just hate-filled reviews that note things like “Bioware has gone woke” and other hate speech. As such, Metacritic is trying to get rid of the reviews that directly break laws within its terms of service; here’s the statement they gave to the website:
“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.”
That’s an important thing to note, as it’s incredibly unlikely that all of the reviews were made by those who hate this game for biased reasons. For proof of this, you need only look at the Steam reviews, which cite many issues with the games that are based on gameplay, dialogue, storylines, characters, and more. That’s why its Steam ranking is only “Mostly Positive,” which is an improvement over a 3.8/10 score, but it does mean that there are still people who think this title could’ve been much better.
The real test of this game’s success will be in how it does in sales. Unfortunately, right now, one has to wonder if it will do well based on early signs.
