There are missions but they’re different. You need to buy a kit first that’ll let you do a certain kind of mission, for example a kit to find special herbs that you bring to a particular character.

Money is more scarce and it is split between “regular” money and gold. Gold gets you good stuff like fancy horses or outfits or kits, but it is rare in the game, unless you pay real money for it.

All that said, there are a lot of people modding and playing online can be quite chaotic, with random objects becoming attached to you, animals spawning, massive explosions, invincible people, etc. But some people are also benevolent and will protect you, especially if you have a low level, and may even gift you stuff.

Anyway, I’d recommend you give it a shot, it’s a way to play with the characters and places you know but in a different way.

For exploring i’d say it’s more fun with friends, though if you just like exploring the world it’s good for that too since The Entire world is unlocked from the get go. There are also story missions, i’d say they’re a bit shallower than the story ones due to the online nature, but not much. I believe they’re shorter though. There’s about ten of them, so you could knock them all out in an evening unless you wanted to so both the Low Honor and High Honor versions. there is also side missions of sorts. They’re far shallower though. They boil down too essentially go to this point, do this task, and leave. sometimes there’s multiple tasks, but that’s the gist of it. Some of them do get creative though. Like there’s a train heist you can do where you have to search a runaway train for an emerald (or a fleeing train if you have a friend hijacking the train for you)

Online is definitely more fun with friends. The Ragdoll physics rockstar has alone makes it fun to play with others because it results in wacky situations (like my friend falling down a ladder, or me tripping him with a lasso and causing him to fall into a lake)