this was exact kind of answer I was looking for. "decent payouts from side missions" when the fuck is that? I clearly have never progress enoughed. Only got five so far and it's more then last time afore I got bored and stopped very mainly due to cause of the unstated high level requirement to progress
I kept it vague to avoid spoilers, because a good portion of side missions require exploration, and most of them have different outcomes depending on how you go about completing them. For me, trying the different routes was one of the few things that kept the game interesting for longer.
I don't know how far along you are, but if you
It's designed to be pretty sandboxy, so it's just a matter of looking around mostly.
Typically if you're running into a difficulty wall, there's another way to complete the quest that bypasses said difficulty.
I almost forgot, depending on the time it is in your game, there are holiday events. They tend to have some money making opportunities from what I can recall.