After a recent string of abusive and disrespectful audience reviews on Metacritic for Horizon Forbidden West‘s recent story-expanding DLC, Burning Shores the review conglomerate has released a statement on the targetted review bombing for Sony’s recent expansion, according to a Eurogamer report.
“Fandom is a place of belonging for all fans and we take online trust and safety very seriously across all our sites including Metacritic. 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,” Fandom and Metacritic said in a joint statement.
“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. We are currently evolving our processes and tools to introduce stricter moderation in the coming months.”
Currently, Burning Shores‘ Metacritic listing has an 82 critic Metascore and a 3.8 user score with almost half of those reviews in the red (negative). The most recent reviews spew comments of hateful homophobia due to an optional dialogue interaction with another female character that she meets during the length of the campaign. It looks like these homophobic reviews are already being removed as the user score was previously a 2.7 earlier today, so looks like Metacritic is already working on its review bombing.
While great, neither Fandom nor Metacritic has expanded on details of these new moderation tools and processes but it’s good to hear that site is taking review bombing more seriously, The act of review bombing has been popping up more and more over the years for games that are more welcoming by just the mere acknowledgement that LGBT+ people exist in the story or as a fully realized character, which I hope more games continue to do so in the future even at the attack from the toxic cisgender “gamer” minority.
As for the future of Horizon, the developer Guerilla Games acknowledges in the most casual way that Aloy’s story will continue, so I’d imagine that Guerilla Games is hard at work on some upcoming projects including an unannounced threequel to this fantastic franchise.
