I've had my suspicions that the professional critics are not properly reviewing games for a number of reasons. The main one being that you don't just get to be a professional game critic because you feel like it. You have to earn it. One of the best ways to "earn" your way into the industry is to gather an audience and then proposition the game developers for free or even advanced copies of the game.
Obviously the developers are not going to give games to anyone who calls them out on their deficiencies and outright failures so the people who say nice things are going to be given preferential treatment. Normally, these reviews have a tendency to normalize over time but lately, and especially in the past 2 years I feel as though the early review scores given by the pros don't really reflect the actual quality of the games.
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73 is not a top-tier score by any means, but 23 reviewers seemed to be doing as much as they could to only focus on the positives of this game. You can see by the more than 2800 reviews done by normal people like you and me, that the general public, who almost certainly played the game a LOT more than the professional reviewers, do not agree with the pros assessment at all.
There have been a lot of people in the industry that have done videos and print such as IGN where they state that they do NOT show big developers preferential treatment out of fear of backlash, but I don't believe them because how can you explain this massive disparity between pro and regular Joe user scores?
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I'm one of the few people on the planet that never got into any of the GTA games. I'm not sure why that is but that is the case. The recent GTA: The Trilogy - Definitive Edition is now the lowest ranked game on all of Metacritic. While the professionals were not as kind to this game as they were to Battlefield they were certainly a lot more kind than the angry general public. I can relate to their frustration too. When I paid full price (around $60) for the last 2 Final Fantasy games only to have them both be rather terrible, this is when I started to suspect that the professionals were paid off to say nice things
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I had very fond memories of FF's Crystal Chronicles and I just thank my lucky stars that the initial release was free to play. I quickly discovered that "remastered" simply means sharpening the graphics a bit - the rest of the game was just awful and kind of destroyed my nostalgia surrounding the original game on the GameCube.
I also feel as though the professionals eventually try to mimic the user rating over time and late reviews from the pros tend to be more in line with what the general public has to say. I wonder why that is?
Professional reviews can't be trusted in my mind and I would much rather look at what actual gamers have to say and that is precisely what I do these day. I ignore the top scores and lowest ones and look at what the people that gave the game a "medium" score have to say. Since just anyone can post to these things it is also quite possible that these scores can be manipulated by the industry as well and I am a bit surprised that Rockstar hasn't tried to do this yet. I would be willing to bet that we can expect a thousand or so poorly spelled and riddled with grammatical errors reviews to pop up in the coming weeks.
This is why I am not an early adopter of games
The early results are almost certainly rigged to a certain degree and it isn't until some time has passed that we can get the word from the actual players since they normally do not have a voice until a week or so later.
If you have any review resource out there that you feel is trustworthy I would love to know what it is!