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Years go by and the inclusion of LGBTQ characters in video games continues to cause controversy

Burning Shores story includes the possibility of a lesbian romance

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It finally came out last week. “Burning Shores”, the new downloadable content for Horizon Forbidden West that invites us to step back into Aloy’s shoes and explore what remains of the city of Los Angeles. But while the news should have been joyous, it’s been marred by the flurry of bad reviews the game is receiving on Metacritic.

The outrage against the game this time is not caused by the price of the DLC or bad gameplay, but by the inclusion of the possibility of having a lesbian romance in the game. In Burning Shores, you can choose whether you want to move on romantically and win over a woman, or if you prefer, dodge that part of the story altogether.

But the possibility of avoiding that romance has not been enough for a part of the gaming community that is used to being outraged with any character that belongs to the LGBTQ community. We saw it a couple of years ago when it was confirmed that Ellie was a lesbian in The Last of Us or when Blizzard decided to announce that Soldado had been in love with a man and now we have to repeat it with Burning Shores.

Burning Shores rating on Metacritic

Many users have decided to leave negative reviews on Metacritic because they do not like lesbian characters

At the time of writing this post, the average rating of user reviews shows a sad 3.2, a terribly low rating. Especially if we consider that many of the users who have left their opinion They have admitted not having tried the game.

The web is littered with messages like: “They made the main character LGBTQ nonsense and ruined the franchise for me. I was excited about this game but now it’s over. Thanks for nothing Guerrilla!”, “Another nonsense lesbian female character or contributes nothing” or “As always, LGBT culture, woke makes everything disgusting. Stay away from our video games!”. Come on, criticism that doesn’t make any sense and is far from constructive criticism of the game.

It seems that, despite the years passing by, a sector of the gaming world is still quite hostile to the LGBTQ community. Come on, they are stuck in the past and have a hard time accepting that 1 in 5,000 characters is a lesbian in video games. Be that as it may, we invite you to give Burning Shores a try and forget about the ridiculous controversies.

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By Geeke