This is something I found interesting about the types of games that I really enjoy and if I'm honest the games that I find myself keep coming back to are those games that are easy to learn and hard to master. Or if they do have complexity it's more to do with story choices and interesting level design etc. than whatever stats you pick for your character at the beginning.
Particularly with RPGs, A great example of this comparison would be Fable 1 and Diablo 2. There are enough options in the game to keep you occupied gameplay wise and find a style you like. However it's not so overwhelming and pants on head retarded that you could be an autist and end up making an excel spreadsheet comparing all the miniscule amounts of stats to find out which is the 'best' class or stats setup.
I'm also thinking about this in terms of appearance customisation and all that nonsense. I wonder if the RPG development cycle overall for an indie dev especially wouldn't end up benefiting by deliberately restricting the options you're going to have so that you can focus more on the depth of the classes you have and the gameplay. As opposed to having 30+ different builds with nothing to show for it which is what most modern RPGs are now.
As an example instead of the usual 'le modern RPG' setup where you've inevitably got 30+ options in the character selection I'd potentially just have Warrior/Thief/Mage/Cleric. Something I really appreciated for example even though BG2 has quite a few class options is stuff like class oriented storylines and quests.
By the way a great example of complexity for the sake of complexity is something that aggravates me about one of my favourite RPGs Baldur's Gate 2. This goes back to my rant about games adapting tabletop RPG rulesets.
I've enjoyed the spellcasting aspect of BG2 it does a really good job of making you feel like a powerful wizard or priest at the later levels. At the same time the amount of extremely specific resistances and abilities enemies have drive me up the wall so I have a very love/hate relationship with this game.
You guys will know what I'm chatting about who play RPGs a lot, level drain is a great example because it's such bullshit. Sometimes the difficulty of classic games isn't down to anything like clever level design. A lot of it is because you have to specifically look up some bullshit cheap effect a monster has inflicted on you in order to counter it properly then you realise because it's not exactly great game design the only way to win is to cheese your way through it regardless.
Warning autistic rant
Firkraag is a great example of this, I decided to look up some kind of proper way to beat him as I was chilling with a classic gaming session. As expected, it was pants on head retarded and you had to do all kinds of specific things to get the bastard. Then somebody mentioned because of how easy it is sometimes to screw with the NPC code you can spam cast a cloud kill wand and get him that way. I do that and he goes down within five seconds. Worse fight ever over and done with and you get an amazing +5 two handed sword for your trouble.
With the vampires where you have to make sure your priest characters have the correct negative plane protection spells to prevent it from happening in the first place. Oh and in typical bullshit classic gaming difficulty they made that specific spell not AOE so you can't buff your whole party with it because the devs are arseholes unless there's an AOE version I'm not aware of which is possible.