I recommend you look at the history of A Tale in the Desert to see how very long trips work out in that game. It's actually quite interesting. The world is huge and it would actually take about a day or two to walk from north Egypt to south Egypt if you had a straight line to walk on (which you rarely do).
There's about ten chariot stops in the world. In the first 'telling' (it's on the fourth restart right now), when you were offline, you could set your character to do mundane actions...harvest crops that you've harvested before, at about 1/10 the speed you would if you were online; you could also accumulate travel time, and spend it to travel from one chariot stop to another. That was the only way to teleport, period.
In later tellings, chariots would occasionally make free runs, but you had to wait for up to half an hour to catch one sometimes. Also, later on, they added "expedition points" that you could set at your home, or some other spot like a mine, and teleport there--but the number of points you could set for teleporting was VERY limited, and there were some distance restrictions I think on how far you could teleport to one.
Early on, roads didn't improve your movement speed; they do, now. Also, stats slightly increase your move speed, but stat boost are really only possible to get by completing certain long-term, competitive quests.
The time it took to get anywhere in the game was *THE* biggest complaint about it. Lots of people liked the atmosphere, but really, every telling, upwards of 2/3 of the population would always say "Ugh, walking is still too slow!" Because when you had new technologies to go learn from universities, you could plan to walk for a few hours to make the rounds. Need to go gather some quicksilver? There's just a couple spots--plan for a couple-hour trip. Want to trade with one of the big player organizations? Well, how far away is their trading center? Of course, most trade centers were right near chariot stops, but there were plenty of places in the world that were 4+ hours away from the nearest chariot stop. It wasn't a big challenge to get somewhere that maybe a handful of players had ever seen in their lives--IF you wanted to spend the time. Easy to build a home in the middle of nowhere.
ATITD had an awesome system for crafting, too, in that it often relied on player skill to a huge degree--even axes for chopping wood had quality modifiers from around 500 (or so?) to 9999, and when you made one, you dropped into a minigame where you hammered it into the right shape, and only had a limited number of strikes based on how good the material was. You could reclaim the material as many times as you wanted, before the axe was done, then it was locked in. Similarly glassmaking puzzles, all kinds of stuff. It was balanced, new players could make their own stuff with practice and trade it to other new players, but the demand for the GOOD stuff was based on "how much time do the truly excellent players want to spend making axes for everyone else".
Now, with the number of people complaining about travel times, I also want to add something else about ATITD. I took an informal poll one time, back when I was still a big player of it. And over half of its population was unemployable. A big part of its playerbase were retired, some disabled vets, people in wheelchairs, or just ridiculously huge aspergers syndrome cases (hey, no arguments about that--the point is they couldn't hold a job). Lots of them were on some sort of welfare, and don't whine about them wasting money on MMOs, it's cheaper per month than seeing a couple movies. Now, these people MADE ATITD into their day-job, so they could feel like they were at least busy with something. That's important to do. But please, recognize what kind of playerbase these ideas will appeal to: The kind of playerbase that has nothing but time.