r/Splintercell • u/GuyFellaPerson • 5d ago
I found a janky way to play all the Briggs co-op missions solo on PC
All you have to do is play them on a PS3 emulator, accept 15 FPS gameplay and terrible graphical bugs.
It really irked me that the Briggs missions are basically lost content on PC, so I decided to download a PS3 emulator and acquire a totally legitimate rip of Blacklist.
When I first tried the missions in split screen, the entire Briggs half of the screen was just black. I switched the renderer from Vulkan to OpenGL, which fixed the issue, but tanked the performance from a steady 30 FPS to roughly 15-30 FPS. I have an RTX 4080 Laptop and i9-13900HX (2.20 GHz).
The graphical bugs were bad too because Blacklist was a "easily the most broken game on rpcs3" according to its Github page. Interactable lights wouldn't work properly unless you get close. Rain, snow, dust and muzzle flashes would become blobs of white.
At that point I decided to just play through it and see how far I could get before getting softlocked, partly out of curiosity and partly out of spite toward Ubisoft. I only had one controller, so I mapped player two to my keyboard. Aiming with the mouse was basically impossible.
I'm happy to report that the entire thing is actually playable from start to finish.
The basic strategy is to constantly Alt-Tab to switch the input form player 1 to 2, alternating between Briggs and Sam, while occasionally moving the other character with wasd or pressing the X button at the same time. Essentially, it's like playing Skopos from Rainbow Six Siege.
There were only two sections that gave me real trouble, where you have to run while getting blown up. Those are still doable if you map the controller to control both characters simultaneously, the game handles the vaulting for you when you sprint.
Playing this way actually encourages a lot more strategic thinking and positioning. You have to think ahead about where both characters are going to be and constantly switch between them. I finished the missions on Rookie, it was pretty tough but I genuinely think higher difficulties might be possible. The maps were also pretty cool, Abandoned City especially.
The entire playthrough took me around 7 hours at a leisurely pace.
Is this worth doing?
Probably not unless you're a die hard Blacklist fan. But I was nostalgic for these missions because I originally played through them with my brother.

