Dragon Age: The Veilguard excited the press before its release and attracted tens of thousands of players at launch – who also commented positively. The first user reviews have now appeared on Metacritic and have a much worse tone.
This is how The Veilguard fares on Metacritic:
This is what users say: There is very little substantive criticism in the reviews. Most reviews award either 0-1 or 9-10 points directly, with both sides of the spectrum giving very few reasons.
In the negative reviews, users primarily criticize BioWare’s decision to make The Veilguard much more inclusive. In German, for example, the entire game is gendered and several non-binary characters appear in the game.
The positive voices counter this with a similar attitude: they just want to compensate for the “transphobic crybabies”. Here and there there are a few reviews that at least specifically praise the gameplay or the story or offer more detailed criticism such as flat characters.
If you compare the votes on Metacritic with those on Steam, you can see a clear gap here. The Steam players rate The Veilguard significantly better at 79% and have roughly the same opinion as the specialist press.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard: 4 tips I wish I had known beforehand
More videos
Autoplay
The Veilguard fails users on Metacritic – where does the difference come from?
Steam has strict guidelines when it comes to reviews. A new law is intended to prevent dubious reviews, which means that some users are observing that critical reviews on Steam appear to disappear at random. You also usually have to own the game.
On Metacritic, however, anyone can give their opinion on a new game 36 hours after its release. However, “review bombing” often occurs, i.e. punishment of a game, even if the game is actually not that bad. The reason is often details or completely different topics.
There’s a kind of meta war going on around the new Dragon Age, which isn’t directly about the game, but rather about the direction in which video games are generally developing. Specifically, proponents of inclusive content are fighting against the “anti-woken.”
This dispute is mainly fought on social media, but also on Metacritic and, in the past, also on Steam.
In the case of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the fronts are apparently quite hardened. So much so that an entire community has decided to take away the right to have a say from anyone who has anything to do with a declared opponent: The Dragon Age: The Veilguard Reddit blocks every fan of a Twitch streamer