There are a million things that you can do in the game, but you don’t have to do any of them. You can stick to the story if you want. It’s probably still a very long game though, even if you only engage in the story.

It’s long, but in a good way. The content isn’t drawn out and repetitive. You want to play it that long. Mostly mentioning rdr2 here which is much better.

you kinda want to dive into that one yeah, although it is a great “on-rails” experience