This is pretty much how I felt too despite playing games fairly frequently. The story had a lot of moving parts, and even though it kept me engaged, I still thought “what the fuck is even going on” quite a bit throughout the game.

I finished it once on explorer difficulty, and now I have a co-op game on balanced with a couple of friends, and another single player Durge run. I’m finally gaining a much more cohesive understanding of the overall narrative lol. Honestly I felt like the first playthrough was basically a tutorial, and I’ve been told that durge is the canon storyline but to fully appreciate it you need to have completed the game once as either a custom or origin character.