Fair enough - semantics. Some people have fun doing this, some don’t. You seem to be part of the second group, no problem with that.
Your initial question was „how do people play those games?“ and „being part of the games online community and/or using the communities resources to play the game“ is one answer. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I am currently into Monster Hunter Rise. It does not exactly do the best job of explaining ingame what „30% Affinity“ on a weapon means. So I looked it up. That was fun to me.
In the end I guess it’s your imperative to research games before you buy them. If they don’t fit your play style, don’t buy them. You don’t mean to say that no one should enjoy „complex“ games, are you?!?
But see, for some people and some genres, the fiddling and trying and testing and redoing IS the actual gameplay.
BG3 is a good example, Factorio came up in this thread as well. And from a certain perspective BG3 is as much of a playground as Tears of the Kingdom. The latter hides the numbers from you, the former invites you to play with them.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I for example can’t seem to get into story driven single player games such as God of War or Farcry. The constant tutorialising drives me nuts…
Not a shooter or a space RTS, but proper prime directive star trekking. Honestly I don’t even know what you would DO in the game. But I can imagine the UI clearly, so there is that…
Maybe somewhat like to old 90s point and click adventure games, only in 2023?!? I don’t know. I want it though.
It’s a survival horror first person rpg with a semi realistic health system. It’s creepy and hard and so goddamn good. I’m am actually surprised that it gets mentioned so rarely because I would not know of any other earlier game with those now so ubiquitous survival mechanics.