Players are outraged over the LGBT component of the Horizon Forbidden West Burning Shores DLC and leave negative reviews on Metacritic, while a game journalist gets furious over the review bombing.
In a new article Robert Zak attempted to convey that same-sex romances in video games are not actually that common and that it is inaccurate to attribute an “agenda” to Burning Shores.
As it turned out, a significant portion of Robert’s piece consists of paragraphs where he speaks rather unfavorably of certain users, for instance:
“Sometimes it feels like no sooner has one wave of toxicity stopped spewing from the mouths of a certain emotionally maladjusted subsection of gamers than the next comes splashing right into our faces. This time — over a same-sex kiss in Horizon Forbidden West Burning Shores. Yes, Aloy is a lesbian (or bi, or just not straight), leading to review bombing, blind rage, and snide comments from cavemen.”
Nevertheless, Robert also spoke on the topic itself. For example, he decided to look back at recent AAA games featuring LGBT protagonists. If we exclude games where same-sex relationships are optional, such as Assassin's Creed and RPGs from BioWare, we are left only with The Last of Us and Horizon, plus a couple of characters in Overwatch (Tracer and Soldier: 76), Life is Strange, and Borderlands.
Robert then expanded the sample to include not just LGBT protagonists, but LGBT characters in general:
“According to Wikipedia’s list of LGBT characters in games, there were only eight games in 2022 featuring LGBT characters. As you might guess, such a small number hardly indicates some unstoppable wave of disproportionate LGBT representation, since even in 2012 there were more LGBT characters in games (12).”
In Robert’s view, there is no dominance of LGBT in video games, but he doubts that his piece will convince toxic users:
“Maybe this whole analysis is pointless and will do little to quiet the sweaty little men whining about this. Perhaps these people don’t really believe in the ‘agenda’, and maybe they aren’t even homophobic, but are just angry because their fantasies about a character they liked have been shattered by the fact that she is now ‘unavailable’ [because she is a lesbian].”