It can be consistent.
For somethind different, but that plays into the same approach, Sim City Societies tried it and it 'worked' (although the overall product was relatively poor compared to other installments).
Is this incoherent?
Do you think this kind of system would be fun?
As will all game design ideas, it really depends on how it's implemented. Fishing can be extremely enjoyable in one game (WoW or Ocarina of Time) and dreadfully boring in another (Minecraft, until the recent improvements). Prototyping is key, to get a feel for whether your specific feature is worth investing in or not. But personally I don't think you should ever prototype entire games, but rather specific features (and feel free to correct me on that with a good argument). Half the game could still become groundbreaking, if you just chipped away the faulty excess. As for how popular it's going to be, well that depends on execution as well. Aesthetics, game flow, you name it. At base, there's no reason to think that it's not going to be successful.
Just don't let it produce effects that are well known gamekillers. Like (1) splitting up the community, (2) making one feature redundant due to the other's existence, or (3) making the game so complex that each feature ends up very shallow, because you don't have the time and resources to flesh each one out properly.
If you wanna make a game that compels in both the side-scroller and the world map aspects, then revolve your game around those two things. Flesh them both out and make them compliment eachother. One way to ensure that one isn't outdated by the other, is to create some interdependency. I.e. to make the most out of the Side-Scroller, using the world map would give some benefit and vice versa.
For somethind different, but that plays into the same approach, Sim City Societies tried it and it 'worked' (although the overall product was relatively poor compared to other installments).
And the question would then be "did a game bomb because of it, or in spite of it?"
I've seen a lot of good features discredited or bad features praised because they were in the wrong game at the wrong time, and some people simply don't understand technical relationships and causality very well (mostly gamers who only sees the surface of things, but also some professional designers).
Just looking at the developers of "How to Survive" atm (505 Games). The title itself is one thing, but they don't even seem to have lifted a finger in the marketing department either. I tried to google How to Survive and check out some youtube clips or whatnot, and let's just say that y'all can try to do the same as see what you'll come up with. The game is due for release this month and it looks very solid - not like an indie game at all. So it's sad to see that it's not presented too much, because visibility is key.
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Thank you for all of the great replies!
Flesh them both out and make them compliment eachother. One way to ensure that one isn't outdated by the other, is to create some interdependency. I.e. to make the most out of the Side-Scroller, using the world map would give some benefit and vice versa.
This is exactly what my current mindset was as well in order to make them more meaningful as a pair. Originally I thought of if it was possible to have an "infinite sidescroller" type of thing, which terraria 2 is going to do. But then this seems almost impossible to have "macro" actions and things like wars between 2 kingdoms (as the only relationship is if they are directly next to each other or not on a side scroller map). That is why in order to have more complex macro things going on, like kingdoms going to war on the world map, npcs running trade routes, etc, I was leaning towards a world map, allowing the player to "enter" and interact with any of those macro world events happening(entering a battlefield, attacking a caravan,etc).
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