Well you are asking two different questions:
1- Can their next game be considered bad?
If by bad you mean under their recent track, but still fun (like Meta 80-85), yea i think it is rather easily to be honest.
TLoU (and Uncharted too) are heavily reliant on story, IMO. It is hard to create a good script and even harder to picture how the player will feel about it by the time you have to pick one (very early in development). To be honest, even TLoU has a lot of cliches. If i remember correctly, i predicted most of the plot twists during the gameplay.
So i think this is the biggest risk, since gameplay and graphics are hardly going to be a surprise anyway.
2- How will critics rate it?
I believe they will rate it high. It is going to come out with other 2 big IP (Zelda and Halo) and no one will want to annoy a fan base to the point of saying that their game is a lot worst than the other 2.
Destiny got what it deserved despite the hype, but that's a third party game and a new IP, so the press is free to do what they want with it. A gaming site that give a low score to the next ND game, will only lose credibility, no matter if the game deserves it or not
