Metacritic Responds To ‘Dragon Age: The Veilguard’ Review Bombing

Metacritic user scores are frequently used a protest metric for certain games, for one reason or another, as an outlet that does not require you to own a copy of a game to rate it, unlike Steam PlayStation or Xbox.

As such, a wide divide opened up after Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s launch between Metacritic user scores, and those other platforms. An updated recap:

• Steam – 73% “Mostly Positive”
• PlayStation – 4.34/5 stars
• Xbox – 4/5 stars
• Metacritic – 3.8/10

Asked to comment about the slew of Metacritic user scores describing Veilguard with terms like “woke,” “DEI,” “propaganda” “agenda-driven” and so on, they issued the following statement:

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

The question is what Metacritic actually labels “abuse” and if many of theses reviews meet those terms. The term “woke” may not be considered racist on its own. Neither is accusing the game of “propaganda” on its face. But “DEI”? It’s unclear what Metacritic thinks and how many reviews have actually been removed here. Not many, from the look of it. The game has 5,267 reviews and listings with all those terms remain. Since I first covered the user scores, it’s only risen from a 3.4 to a 3.8, still not reflective of other platforms with their ownership requirements.

It’s clear Metacritic is using a somewhat narrow criteria to remove reviews, as simply saying a game goes against your politics which is why you’re giving it a 0/10 is probably not grounds for actual removal. Some review sites like Rotten Tomatoes have tried to implement systems where you “verify” you’ve seen a movie to rate it, though they have not managed to figure out a system to do that for TV shows. Here, given that Metacritic does not sell the actual game, there’s probably no way to do this here either, so you’re simply going to have to take these user scores for what they are.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s actual Metacritic scores has dropped from an 84 to an 83 since launch, at least on PS5. On PC, with half the reviews in, it’s a 79. EA has yet to issue any firm data about sales, and we’ll see if that changes any time soon.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.