I made Judge Roy Bean (The old version), but am still in the tutorial. Can I play without having to do combat with every jerk who happens to run across me?
Do you mean PVP? You can set yourself to Defensive mode which means you can’t be targeted. That keeps people from using Paint it Black or other Deadeye skills on you or lassoing you but then can still do dumb stuff like fire explosive ammo at your feet. You can also, after a death, choose to Parlay with the attacking party. This forces them to be non-hostile to you for ten minutes. There’s no cost to this, it’s just a “Ok, I’m done” flag. Don’t bother assigning a bounty to them; it’s largely meaningless and, if it’s noticed at all, will likely be seen as a mark of pride. For what it’s worth, this isn’t GTAO and most people don’t start shit for no reason but, of course, you always have exceptions or the “I’m bored so I had to troll that guy 'cause R* didn’t give me enough game content” idiots.
If you mean NPCs, you basically need to provoke NPCs to attack unless they’re bandits, bounties or other bad dudes.
As for whether the game is good or not… I liked it. The scenery and wandering about was excellent and I enjoyed leveling up the various trades you’ll be offered later on (trader, bounty hunter, collector, etc). The gold cost for stuff starts out feeling like a burden but, once you get rolling, it lightens considerably. It felt like I went from fighting for every 0.1 gold to having enough gold to buy my trades to having 300+ gold in my pocket in a fairly quick succession.
Play long enough and you’ll eventually get over the hump where gold and cash come easy and you’ve “done it all”. Unfortunately, Rockstar doesn’t seem to have many new ideas that aren’t just the same missions with different hats – Go here, shoot that dude, carry that item back here. Sometimes the item is a mail pouch or a gem or a letter or whatever but it gets samey. Still, it was a fun ride to get to that point and I just semi-retired after I’d done all the content and now am popping back in for the Outlaw missions and “Quickfire” passes. Play for a few nights, do the new stuff, then take another break.
Thank you for the highly informative and detailed response!