Ugh, not again. Here's the short version:
- No choice and consequences in dialogues.
- Not even dialogue trees or anything remotely similar.
- No choice and consequences in any mission.
- No player driven character development outside of buying new guns.
- No skills or perks or anything like that.
- The game world is not influenced by players actions.
- It's a shooter.
Yes, both have a big world you can walk around in and hunt animals, but that doesn't make it an RPG.
In a way, the online mode is more an RPG than the story mode, as you can choose from various bonus / perk cards that give you special abilities (higher bullet resistance, etc), but they are super expensive to level up so I didn't really bother with them yet.
/edit: Another screenshot.
In story mode that town was full. In online it feels so empty.