my jaw dropped upon seeing this. what the FUCK did they do to tess???!! this remake is fucked up man.

@beardalaxy They aged her up according to the time between releases Someone didn't tell the art department that this wasn't a sequel lol

Next Skyrim release should do the same thing. Skyim: The Lore Accurate Aging Edition where everyone is 20 years older.

@susie tess is supposed to be in her 40s in the game, but like why go through the effort of redesigning the entire character? as if the original designers didn't know she was that old or something? do they think you just immediately become ugly when you're 40 or something? it might be millennials who are trying to cope with aging or some shit.

@beardalaxy I wouldn't call her ugly from the photo alone. To me she does look more like a 40 year old now than in the PS3 edition, I wasn't aware of her age in lore. Looking at that earlier photo she looks like 20-30 years old (under that dirt).

So idk. Knowing the age makes it seem more like a nothingburger now... I could argue the original PS3 one got her wrong and they corrected her when given more realistic graphic engine. Remember most PS3 skins are super smooth so it is hard to age character without going directly to "grandma" look with wrinkles. That's why all NPCs look so similar in those games.

The bone structure is slightly different, but then again they might have just recycled some younger skeleton on the PS3 version without bothering to make an unique/older one.

@susie i'd agree for a lot of devs, but this is naughty dog at the absolute top of their game we're talking about. they were so damn meticulous about everything this game. joel is about the same age as tess and looks pretty much his age (which they still pushed further in the remake anyway). the person who originally designed these characters surely had the intention of doing it this way.

and that's part of the problem. for the remake, they redesigned all the characters. new art director, as far as i'm aware. it really just reeks of "we did your job better" mentality and is disrespectful to the vision of the original game. not just druckmann's vision which is apparently not what tons of players believed while playing the game, but the entire team's vision. each moving part.

on top of that, the character no longer looks unique. she loses all, well, character... just blends in. in the push for heavier "realism" in games, so much has been lost. if i saw that picture of her without the logo plastered on top i would never guess that it was tess. i wouldn't even be able to tell you it was last of us related because it just looks exactly like everything else does. i guess "ugly" isn't exactly the right word for it, but just bland? uninspired?

maybe they could have aged her up a little bit but at least kept her same general look. gone with a more "in-between" situation. it's just sort of character assassination as well as shitting on the legacy of the game and the work the old devs did.

nobody got it worse than sarah though. holy shit. she looks so much worse, like bordering on uncanny valley looking. criticize that though and you have people jumping down your throat asking you why you want a child character to look good in a video game.

it's like yes, on paper, it looks theoretically "better." better skin textures, higher quality mesh with more bones for animations, new lighting techniques that respect materials more, etc and whatever the fuck. it just looks WEIRD though. and it loses the quality that the original game had of looking almost hyper-realistic in a video-gamey way that almost sold the illusion to you, but now since they've pushed for way more "realism-accurate" graphics it just looks strange and uncanny.

i think the original game's graphics are just going to age a lot better because they still had style to them. the artists realized that. new shit has no style.