Metacritic is removing ‘abusive’ Dragon Age: The Veilguard reviews

Metacritic has responded to the review bombing of Dragon Age: The Veilguard by removing “racist, sexist, homophobic” ratings.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard is BioWare’s first return to Thedas in a decade but it’s had a rocky journey. BioWare’s documented letdowns with Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, combined with some questionable reveal marketing had prospective players doubtful of the game.

Despite the uphill battle, the game launched to favorable reviews – including our own – and managed to surpass all of BioWare and EA’s single-player offerings on Steam. It has managed to maintain a healthy player count on the platform and fans of the franchise are digging deep into the game’s content for signs of a sequel.

Of course, it can be hard to talk about Dragon Age: The Veilguard without bringing up the relentless campaign from its detractors for its perceived “wokeness”. Within hours of the game’s release, it was inundated with incredibly low user reviews on Metacritic which has forced the aggregator to respond.

BioWare

Qunari companion Tassh’s non-binary gender identity is apparently a sore point for some.

At present, Dragon Age: The Veilguard has a user score of 3.8 on Metacritic with hundreds of reviews giving it a zero out of 10. Many of these reviews were posted on launch day despite a beelined playthrough of the game taking upwards of 40 hours.

A significant number of the zero out of 10 ratings also focus on the game’s “politics” rather than its gameplay or features. “We don’t want sanitized dialogue, gender ideologies, or any real-world politics shoved down our throats,” one review reads. “This is a travesty to old-time Dragon Age fans.”

“Awful dialogue and obviously some woke agenda psyop. This is censorship at its worst,” complains another user scoring the game zero out of 10. Many more cite “forced DEI” and “modern gender ideology” as their reason for scoring the game so low.

In a statement made to Eurogamer, a spokesperson for Metacritic addressed the review bombing of Dragon Age: The Veilguard following complaints from users that their reviews had been deleted.

“We take online trust and safety very seriously across all our sites including Metacritic,” the spokesperson explained. “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.”

Dexerto / Bioware

Other complaints about Dragon Age: The Veilgaurd relate to its shift in tone.

In stark contrast to Metacritic, Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Steam rating sits at ‘Mostly Positive’ based on over 13,000 player reviews. The difference between Steam and Metacritic being that Valve’s platform requires users to own, and have played the game to leave a review.

Steam’s user rating for the game sits at 7/10 which aligns far more closely with Metacritic’s critic score of 8.3/10.