[Note: This story contains small spoilers for Guerilla Games’ Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores DLC.]
Review aggregate site Metacritic said it planned to “evolve its processes” for user reviews to prevent
from flooding the site with negative reviews as a form of retaliation. The change has been brough on due to review bombing of Guerrilla’s recent Burning Shores expansion for Horizon Forbidden West.
In the game’s new content, players can choose to have protagonist Aloy enter a romantic relationship with Seyka, a character introduced in the expansion. Upon the expansion’s release, players gave it a a low user rating on Metacritic, using the comment section to call out the DLC for choosing to portray a queer relationship.
In a statement given to Eurogamer, Metacritic said it was “aware of the abusive and disrespectful reviews…and we have a moderation system in place to track violations of our terms of use. […] We are currently evolving our processes and tools to introduce stricter moderation in the coming months.”
It’s worth noting that reviews from Metacritic previously resulted in developers losing bonus pay for their efforts, as we learned with Obsidian Entertainment after Fallout: New Vegas released in 2010. It’s not known how much user reviews play into that, but the negative reaction may have affected Guerrilla all the same.
At time of writing, the user rating for Burning Shores is at 4.0 out of 10. Multiple reviews of the expansion that have violated the site’s terms of use have been removed.