Reviewers still score games in the same 6-10 range, but it seems like 9+ scores are fewer than before.

I think reviewer got into the habit of giving games the score we want to see rather than the scores that games deserved. Some big franchises got a bit of a free pass just because of their lineage, in my opinion. I'm not complaining because I like being panda'd to.

Lately, it seems like reviewers are taking a step back and basing their reviews on the actual merits and flaws and even the originality of game franchises. Meta scores suffer as a result but I think the media is being much more honest, now. It's better for the consumer to not have these artificially inflated scores.

Yes because review sites don't review bad games so reviews are always biased. The CEO of metacritic came out requesting more reviews for lower quality titles since there is a lack of reviews for them. Without a balance of games the standard isn't consistent. The standard only increases.

Anyways anyone reviewing games doesn't really have a better sense of if a game will be fun or is good anyway...

So you like Pandas?

Well Dark Souls seems to be doing fine so far..

Honestly i think its just because the "wow" factor has left alot of series. Though some games like CoD still seem to get 90-95 scores based purely off sales expectations.

What's interesting is it represents the opposite direction to how reviews tend to go in a gen - i.e. too high early on and tougher later.  As a game that positively revels in being hardcore it's actually getting a starry eyed tone in most reviews vs more established titles.  Not that it doesn't look a 90% or above title on its own merit from what I've seen so far mind.

The scores are still way too high. I find it best to subtract 2 (or 20 if out of 100) points from most games, and you will get much closer to the score that many games actually deserve. A general trend seems to be that European based review sites/mags tend to give lower scores on average which is a high point in their favor. Trash mags like Gameinformer are part of the reason why video games are still rated much higher on average than they actually deserve ... giving virtually everything at least a 7 which is above average even though many of the games that receive this score are actually more like a 5 making them average/borderline below average.

On top of this, there is also the matter of a standard that reviewers can rally behind. Games tend to not be judged on their originality/artistic value, but by some other standard like developer/series pedigree. One of my favorite recent examples of this was Gameinformer's scoring on Deus Ex Human Revolution (a game of big ideas and very few flaws) and Dead Island (a zombie sandbox game with not a single new idea added to either genre) both getting the same score of 8.5.