After Horizon Forbidden West’s DLC was review bombed, Metacritic has promised to change how it moderates.
Horizon Forbidden West’s first DLC, Burning Shores, was released on April 19th for PS5, and since, its Metacritic score has been furious review bombed. This largely comes down to the DLC’s main character, Aloy, being able to romance another character, Seyka. Some aren’t happy with the depiction of same-sex romance in the DLC, so its average user score has dropped significantly.
According to the company that owns Metacritic, Fandom, “Metacritic is aware of the abusive and disrespectful reviews of Horizon Forbidden West Burning Shores and we have a moderation system in place to track violations of our terms of use,” continuing, “Our team reviews each and every report of abuse (including but not limited to racist, sexist, homophobic, insults to other users, etcetera) and if violations occur, the reviews are removed. We are currently evolving our processes and tools to introduce stricter moderation in the coming months.”
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It’s not exactly clear how Metacritic plans to change things, but review bombing has been a problem on many different sites with user reviews for a while. Essentially, folks will not like a product for a particular reason and post incredibly low-scoring user reviews in an attempt to drag the game’s overall user review score down. If we had to guess, a new policy with some restrictions on what can be included in a review as well as restrictions on who can post user reviews seem like the most likely changes, but ultimately, we’ll all have to see.
Outside of Burning Shores’ user review score on Metacritic, though, Horizon Forbidden West’s first DLC has been receiving high praise from critics and fans alike across the internet, so if you’re interested in trying it out, don’t let Metacritic’s low user score dissuade you too much given the situation.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
