[jdk]

In terms of discovery and wonder, I think Valheim did a good job of it in the general atmosphere and loop, but in terms of magic systems, not really. You have the Magika (or even Path of Exile) where spells have component parts and build into something larger, but there's not much mystery there.

A theme of a bunch of the comments is that the internet / audience makes this sort of thing impossible these days. One of my white whales for game design is figuring out if mystery, especially in multiplayer games, is still possible in a meaningful way.

[rjewell]

Literal showerthought while ruminating on this idea: are you aware of any multiplayer systems where individual characters have intentional Wi flags (good and bad) at a very granular level? for example, every spell or skill includes a fixed modifier generated for the player so that two identically built characters have different capabilities. Every aspect determining success or power has one. You are just slightly slower at lockpicking in the rain and your fireball casts a little faster than average, and the decrease in damage for casting while moving is a bit more significant.

You remove the “meta” from the game because every character has a different meta that is just a little too cumbersome to figure out in any way other than “feel” it.

[jdk]

I think a few (persistent) games touched on things like that, but I can't think of any that really went hard on it for long-term characters (instead you mostly see it in roguelikes/lites where if you got a bad roll, it didn't matter since you were making a new character soon anyway). At a very broad level, this is sort of what the taper system did but that was cracked after 6 months or whatever and it didn't really offer any meaningful differentiation beyond brute-forcing permutations.