The One Red Dead Redemption Mission We Still Hate

Despite the ability to grow a perfect beard and witness some truly fantastic horse accidents, some aspects of Red Dead Redemption 2 were less than perfect. And we're not just talking about the weird glitches found throughout the game. Even though the majority of the quests in Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2 aren't terribly difficult, one mission remains burned in our memory.

During chapter 2 in RDR2, you'll happen upon an energetic stranger who asks Arthur if he smokes. Upon replying, "Not as much as you", the stranger tells Arthur of his love of collecting cigarette cards. The man, whose name we learn to be Phineas T. Ramsbottom, smokes almost 200 cigarettes a day just for the chance of finding a new cigarette card that he doesn't already have. 

This leads us to the mission that still haunts our nightmares: Smoking and Other Hobbies. As he's catching his train, Ramsbottom will task Arthur with finding a complete collection of cigarette cards for him. While you don't technically have to finish the mission, any completionist will tell you that no mission is actually "optional."

So, you set off to complete the card collection and mail them to Ramsbottom. Simple, right? The problem is that the cards are scattered all over the world of RDR2, which makes finding all of them almost impossible. Add to that the fact that there are 144 cards total, and you've got a monumental task in front of  you. 

There is an option for players to simply buy a pack of cigarettes and get the cards that way, but even if you miraculously managed to get every card from a cigarette pack without ever finding a duplicate, you would have to spend around $360 on cigarettes alone. And the odds of never getting a duplicate card are slim.

To add just a bit of insult to injury, there are numerous bugs in the mission that make things even more difficult. If you happen to pick up a cigarette card after you've already completed the mission, the mission itself will reset and all of your mailed cards will be unchecked. There is also a glitch where mailing the Prominent Americans Card Set will remove the Fauna of America Card Set from your inventory. This will also happen the other way around, meaning you have to send these two card sets together. And if you didn't know about the glitch, you will have lost a good chunk of progress.

Any collection mission can be frustrating for those with little patience or bad luck, but Smoking and Other Hobbies was a special brand of awful, taunting completionists with just how time consuming it was. At least it wasn't an escort quest.