Sure there’s a lot of missions involving shooting being a western game, but other examples are fishing with John’s kid, breaking or stealing horses, burning down a plantation’s field, getting everyone in a bar drunk, finishing a poker game for a drunk reverend before rescuing him off a train tracks, rescuing your ex gf’s brother from a cult, teaching a widower to hunt, building a house, or hell even shoveling shit in exchange for information. The side missions are often more interesting though, in terms of characters. Like meeting the pseudo
Tesla figure and how all that plays out.
The game also leaves a lot unexplained though so it’s easy for most people to overlook some things as far as mechanics go
RDR2 has some of Rockstar’s best writing imo, as it foreshadows a lot of events for the original. It also seems to have the best examples of world building, which YouTuber’s like
Strange Man have pretty much made a channel out of.