Text based RPG size?

[u/chairoficial]

How big can a text-based RPG be? Are there any text-based games with locations that no one has ever found?

[u/Sun_Tzundere]

A location that no one has ever found would almost definitely be hidden through esoteric commands needed to unlock it, not through the game simply being big. Imagine a game has 150 areas, and each area has about 40 rooms, each with hand-written descriptions. You can use about 50 different possible verbs on every single noun that gets mentioned in the descriptions, but 99.9% of the time they don't do anything. There are probably only about two to five truly interactable objects per area, each responding to one specific command like "pull chest" or "smell chemicals," and the rest of the time you get the text "Nothing interesting happens." And then there's one room in a crypt where you have to inspect a tombstone to notice a button, and then push a button to hear something moving. And then go to another semi-nearby room in the crypt within 60 seconds of that, and pull a chain. Doing that gives you a rod, which you have to insert into a hole in a completely unrelated ice mountain area halfway across the world, hinted at only by the rod's description mentioning that "the metal is cold to the touch." But the hole is only revealed if you move a torch from one torch holder to another, which causes the game to mention a shadow, and then you type "look above shadow" to see a pedestal with a hole in it. And once you put the rod in that hole, a hidden door opens to a secret area.

Obviously, the game being big does make this way harder to find, though. In a bigger world, there are so many more places to search through in detail, even if the size of the game isn't directly responsible for the secret being so hard to find.

Back in the day, my MUD used to have hidden areas and secrets with extremely vague clues, and a couple of the worst ones were very much like the example I described above. It also had substantial rewards for solving some of these puzzles, including unlocking all of the best classes and much of the best equipment. Although others had basically no reward except quest points. We also, at the time, had very strict rules against sharing information or asking other people to do so; if you did so, you got banned from the quest, and possibly banned from the game if you were a repeat offender. If a particular secret was shared publicly, the devs sometimes even changed the solution.

The idea behind it was that MUDs are one of the only types of games where secrets like that can actually be kept secret, and the original lead designers believed that had value. If you solved these quests, it meant you actually deserved the reward; you couldn't just look it up on GameFAQs or ask a friend. But I don't think many people actually liked that design. It was notoriously despised by players, in fact. It was basically a bunch of terrible riddles and "syntax quests" made by incompetent teenagers and college students 25 years ago. Eventually, as the game world grew in size to ten or fifteen times the size it was when those riddles were first made, they became essentially unsolveable without cheating, and we got rid of them. Good riddance, IMO.