Agreed about the importance of a world model. People get enamored with increasing text volume with LLMs, but unless it ties back into distinct game state interactions, players quickly recognize it as fluff and it ends up not really adding to the game.
It's not exactly a text-based adventure game (more text-based trading), but recently I spent some time messing around with integrating an LLM with a text-based world model. It's not 100% reliable, but I've had some pretty satisfying interactions with it: https://github.com/heyitsguay/trader
Basically, you're a trader traveling around a world buying and selling goods, but the economy is tuned such that you can only really get ahead by conning the NPCs >:D
It's not exactly a text-based adventure game (more text-based trading), but recently I spent some time messing around with integrating an LLM with a text-based world model. It's not 100% reliable, but I've had some pretty satisfying interactions with it: https://github.com/heyitsguay/trader
Basically, you're a trader traveling around a world buying and selling goods, but the economy is tuned such that you can only really get ahead by conning the NPCs >:D