Get rid of overland travel and make going from point A to point B just scene to scene walking. If you want to travel faster you take airships that use the overland map. This way it actually makes sense how fast you go on the overland and it would look cool seeing an airship fly across the map. Now, areas will actually mean something instead of being able to sprint across the land as a giant anywhere you want.
Wouldn't work as new players wouldn't be able to travel to towns unless you have massive chains of 1 skull zones that go from point A to point B and it would also make it much more difficult to implement all the cities we have intelligently with adventure scenes.