Shipping and postal services will be very viable options. The map will be quite large. We dont know exact sizes, but it was said that the world would take 48 real life hours to cross at walking speed if you walked without stopping. So, its a very large world.
I know that the world will be procedural generation, so presumably, fairly large.
I think this was mentioned in one of the Q&As and from what I remember it will be enormous. They really seem to be aiming for a limited number of servers per region, so the world will have to be sizable. And that also means more things to explore (which I personally love).
Caspian has talked specifically about how their program works if an area has not been traveled by anyone for a few days, so presumably it's large enough to have some truly remote areas.
This actually came up in IRC this very week and we got some actual numbers! Whoop!
So lets start with size:
"Right now, we're looking at around 256 km across. We may go bigger than that if we can." - Good Caspian
However, when the questions started flying about if that was the whole, world, first continent etc. Caspian became his normal helpful self:
"Well, when the game first starts, is there a difference between the whole world and the continent? ;-) ... You have no idea how big And you shouldn't." - Evil Caspian
How fast will we move across it though? Because if we all move 100km a second that will not matter! Well luckily we were provided those too. Waling is 1.44m/s, 3.8m/s for running, and finally 7.2m/s would be a sprint.
That means if you ran constantly, which you can not do because you have to rest, and went in a straight line, which you almost certainly can't do because of terrain etc., then it would take almost 19 real life hours to cross. You add in the time for rests, navigation, dealing with issues on the road, then it is going to take a while.
Basically, please, please make a shipping company we need you!
For people, just like me, who can't really get a feeling of how big this world actually is:
Skyrim map size (East to West):around 5-6 km
Elder Scrolls online size: Around 27km from one end to the other.
Eastern Kingdom (WoW) North to south: Around 19km.
Now all the sizes that I have found are estimations made by players, but comparing that to the 256km Elyria is gonna be pretty damn big!.
I liked how Wurm did it. Each server was an island and you could sail between them but it would take a long time.
I really do hope it's grand. Also, how sweet would it be to book passage on someone's ship and sail away . . . or try and be a stowaway!
Yea I really enjoyed Caspian's approach to this question, I believe he also added in that Elyrians still debate whether the world is flat or round which led me to imagine how a player would be able to figure that out, it's really exciting to think that players might have to answer the question of "does the world "end" or does it connect together at a certain point?"- as most everyone assumes that worlds are ALWAYS round.
The Witcher 3 and Daggerfall would be better comparisons of size, probably.
and about Elyria being flat or round, unless you have one of these crazy theories, the existence of timezones or not would kill that question.
