There was this game I played a long time ago, a browser/MUD style game that was based on Grendel and Beowulf. It was wildly unbalanced, but that's exactly why everyone at the time loved it, because while it was punishingly difficult and unfair, and your character could permadie a thousand different bullshit ways, if you played right and used your head, you could become a literal god and start crushing everyone around you until you alone were in command of a server. Then the dev would reset and everyone would start over to do it all again.
Spells in that game felt like actual magic with real power rather than just another move that does 3d10 damage. If you threw a fireball for instance, sure you might damage a player, or you might burn up all their expensive, hard-won armor and weapons, or you might just instantly turn them into a pile of ash. If you learned a paralysis spell, it wasn't "you stun player for x amount of turns". No, it was really that guy is now paralyzed lol, do whatever you want because he's fucked unless someone heals him. You could learn abilities that let you permanently drain another player's stats. Combine that with the aforementioned paralysis spell, and you could bully the shit out of your enemies by making them watch as you slowly reduced their stats to the negative numbers, making their character's unplayable even if somehow they did get cured. And if you got the morph ability, you could turn yourself permanently into another NPC, player, or boss monster, taking on all of their spells, abilities, and stats. It led to some amazing moments and actual player lore where people would pass around stories of different things people did in this server or that.
It helped that the dev and the player community refused to hold anyone's hands or reveal any secrets to the game at the time. If new players begged to be spoonfed, they'd get told to figure it out. Sure that made plenty quit but it also provided mystery to things, and it encouraged a sort of knowledge arms race, where if you found a tactic that worked, you protected it religiously, until someone else figured it out, then you'd experiment toward the next thing.
You rarely get shit like that anymore, because everyone's so obsessed with balance and data and having everything laid out for them, until there's nothing interesting, special, or surprising. It's just do this thing, follow this formula, and win. Step out of line, get reported for throwing.