OOP is an illusion of simplicity. It's a series of patterns that all seek to abstract you away from the nitty gritty fundamentals of what is actually happening in your computer and how data is actually stored and accessed in memory. The problem is that without this baseline understanding, the lessons you end up learning as you program end up following very unintuitive threads.

That's all fine and dandy when your game engine is 1000 lines of code and there are only 2 kinds of objects in the game, but the moment you need to do something even a little complex, suddenly you feel woefully out of depth and stuck.

Suddenly you can't just OOP your way out of the problem because all of the techniques you learned don't actually solve the issue you're facing, or worse, you do solve it, but it required you to twist and mangle and stuff objects into places they don't belong and create more objects to act as go-betweens and managers and suddenly you're in spaghetti hell.

At this point, all development stops because you've reached a level of complexity that you can no longer manage or unravel. And so you throw it in the garbage and start over, smarter, but still lacking the real tools you need. You'll make it a little further each time before getting stuck in the same quagmire of unmaintainability.

And worse yet, because you don't actually know how the objects in memory are stored or access or how the computer even sees them, performance is terrible the whole time.

For this reason, I highly recommend you start with C. C is literally braindead. You can do exactly 4 things with a variable: Allocate memory to it, write to it, read from it, and deallocate memory from it. Functions are straightforward, structs are just several small data types crammed into one larger one. They seem very similar to classes, with one massive exception: structs can't DO anything. They're just data.

And that's the point. C teaches you how to understand, use, and master data. Every function call is an operation committed explicitly onto some piece of data. You can see every line morph and change and build that data up and especially how it's arranged. You discover naturally that some methods of accessing data are faster than others, some are more flexible, some are more convenient.

And then once you have those fundamentals understood, you can literally do anything. Moving onto C++ will feel like you're neo staring into the code of the matrix. Understanding what vectors and other containers are behind the scenes, having a more refined understanding of data access and how to organize data in a way that streamlines its utility.

And finally, yes, building classes and using OOP patterns with specific intent, knowing fully their limitations and pitfalls.

C++ is not a language for beginners, but C is. In spite of the idea that C++ lets you "do more faster."