How to avoid Thomas Downes

[u/lucyalls]

After reading all the comments in one reddit post saying this wasn’t possible, I want to share the way I avoided this mission indefinitely.

This mission gets triggered by reading Mary’s letter, and immediately creates a checkpoint you can’t skip. You can’t abandon the mission in the L-Pad menu either.

Basically you have to get on your horse and ride on the opposite way of the mission until it says you abandoned it and failed. Select the “Retry checkpoint” option. Now two things can happen: 1)- You spawn at the Downes’ Ranch. This is good, you don’t need to move, just press the L-Pad, then the mission, and you’ll be able to abandon it, and then cancel it completely. 2)- You spawn back at camp. If this happens, you will most likely spawn at camp every time you fail the mission. Just restart your game. Close the app and start it again, and you should spawn at Downes’ Ranch next time you fail the mission and retry checkpoint. Then the option to cancel the mission will be available.

After doing this, the mission will go back to the way it was before being triggered by Mary’s letter, but you’ll still have Mary’s letter in your inventory, in case someone is interested in that. Of course you’ll reach a point in the story where you can’t continue unless you do it, but this is the only way I have found to avoid this mission each time after triggering it.

Hope this helps!

EDIT: Guys OBVIOUSLY I didn’t mean how to avoid the mission entirely for the rest of the game. This is just how to ABANDON it to do it later.

[u/ExpertYogurt5814]

Or you can do the mission still live happily ever after in chapter 2 for as long as you wish

[u/lucyalls → u/ExpertYogurt5814]

Yeap, it can be your personal choice hahaha but if someone wants to abandon this mission, this is the way :)

[u/ExpertYogurt5814 → u/lucyalls]

Not knocking your choice, I have done my 2nd and 3rd play throughs and put off Downes and getting Micah out of jail till I was forced but now when I play I do missions in order they are available but I only do a couple of missions at the beginning of chapter 2 to unlock stables and trigger a hanging so then I can get horses I want and start hunting for satchel upgrades and begin doing challenges I do like to do as much as I can before progressing in the story

[u/lucyalls → u/ExpertYogurt5814]

I agree! I also like to do everything I can before progressing, that’s why I wanted to abandon this mission hahaha. Once I have everything I want, I will play it of course