3 Tips for Remaking and Improving Old Game Characters
In March of 2026, NVIDIA released DLSS 5 at GTC 2026.
The premise was simple: upscale your in-game textures with generative AI, overhauling the lighting and textures for a refined look. Like most AI-related releases, it was met with backlash at worst and a mixed public reaction at best. In this article, we’re going to discover why that happened and how to avoid it. I’ll go in-depth on how to remake and improve a character design while appealing to the target audience.
Historically, AI-related releases have been the most predictable thing on your feed. Though many argued this could be useful for old games with dated graphics or to boost productivity in indie studio productions, we’re going to break down how to do it correctly.
Step 1: Stop paying attention to what AI is doing.
If you look around, you’ll notice that the most meaningful breakthroughs in games and their tech aren’t brought in because they’re innovative but because they solve a problem.
The best game release today isn’t copying Naughty Dog circa 2018.
The days of game characters being just pretty are over. We’re looking at what the market wants to relate to on the creative side and solving production problems to get there on the technical level. When upscaling characters, the priority should be to do it right rather than to just get it done. Here’s a hypothetical list of possible ways to measure for success ahead:
What are the problematic textures?
What tech are the competitors using?
Is there a plugin for this?
Is this going to be seen in-game a lot for us to invest resources into upscaling in the first place?
Can this be solved using simple techniques? Maybe by just boosting the level of contrast? You’d be surprised at how simple it is to probe a problem once you slow down and audit, before slapping a fix on it.
The most important thing is to ensure the original asset does not change while you’re fixing these issues…. which is exactly what the AI solution did not do. It disregarded the existing visuals and, instead of upscaling them, it replaced them entirely. The result: People notice when you change the look of a fan favorite.
And this is part of the trend we’re really seeing, where game studios are tasked not just with game design and making things look pretty, but to also build community, and a sense of emotional connection with the story and characters. It’s no longer a nice-to-have to have a “good story” and a memorable character protagonist, unlike in the 70s to 90s video game era; it’s a must-have, and generating it from a database of pre-existing references is likely to be met with backlash due to its generic output. Sure, the graphics are great, and they are in fact higher resolution in the AI-generated version, but in a way that doesn’t serve the story that was there in the first place.
"Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Add details to an image without overwhelming the viewer.
These are paint-overs to teach my (concept art) mentorship students how to remake old characters for modern games. I thought I'd share them.
This new version has less detail than the DLSS5 version, but she was never meant to have lipstick, fuller lips, tons of makeup, and it's more in sync with the original character design of Grace Ashcroft.
More detail does not mean more depth.
The secret for adding details is often about what you don't do. Junior artists often fall for the trap of adding more and more detail without a plan, but master painters like Rembrandt and Sargent understood the concept of "Brush economy": They added details to just a few important areas in their paintings (like the face), and kept other parts less detailed. This controls where people will look first when looking at art. Otherwise, they'll overwhelm the viewer with no priorities on detail distribution.
In this instance, I used:
Original references of Julia Pratt (original face model cast by Capcom). It's important to respect the source material and what the audience liked about the character in the first place.
Rounder face references to achieve the semi-realistic style Capcom is known for.
"This is our job as designers – to continue making decisions until the purpose of the design is perfectly clear. Then you are done." - Terry Acker
Step 2: Listen to your consumers and the culture in games.
You want to analyze what made the previous character work; this includes scraping Steam and Reddit communities for reviews and feedback, and watching for sentiment and trends on what’s happening with your competitors. What is the main narrative for this character?
What made her work in the first place? What are people tired of seeing on screen, and where can you push something unexpected, but still pay homage to what made the fans like the character in the first place?
What other character reworks took place that people did not like? Why?
Let’s say that with this character, Grace Ashcroft: she’s had a rough childhood, moved around a lot, so she’s on the introvert side, she’s a tech-nerd too, likely sought refuge in quaint hobbies and interests that did not require her to make friends, since, those were out of the equation for someone who’d move houses frequently. She was also an orphan, and probably doesn’t trust people a lot. Her social life was likely online, where she’d feel the safest and where this was most convenient.
Now you know what your audience wants to see. There are aspects of Grace that will be non-negotiable. If you were to remake her appearance, you know that the core identity needs to stay intact. Let’s say you start to connect the dots with reference, because they cast Julia Pratt at first. Why was this character cast? Her pale skin looks frail, which adds to her persona, so changing her ethnicity is out of question (although AII did exactly this by changing her eye anatomy in the screenshot from Slavic and Eastern European to something more Western European)
Taking the average beauty standards into account, Julia Pratt looks pretty; she’s a model, but it’s not why she was cast. She was cast because of the vulnerability she communicates with her looks.
Now, okay, ask yourself: what other ways can we make this personality work through visuals? Where are we experiencing the friction in the AI version?
"If you try to change it, you will ruin it. Try to hold it, and you will lose it. When you accept yourself, the whole world accepts you" - Lao Tzu.
Step 3: Play with your Character Archetype
One of the best tricks I like to employ when working with clients is to go back to the source material; it works for remastering old characters or making new ones. What was our intention initially? This helps the whole project stay on track. Resident Evil Requiem isn’t an old game, but let’s take a few examples here, if you had to distill everything into a formula.
Benny from Fallout New Vegas: A character from 2010. Who is he? Trickster, unpredictable, Las Vegas charismatic 50s thug. Where’s the source material? There’s a bit of Elvis influence, too, and Frank Sinatra in the fashion sense. Why? Benny has main character energy; he’s often involved in shady practices.
The original actor was Matthew Perry; he carried this kind of energy, but unlike Grace’s design, Benny’s character game model is older, so there’s more creative freedom in redesigning him, while staying true to the story of Fallout New Vegas and the role he plays.
Digging deeper, I also found that this character design was based on Bugsy Siegel, an American mobster who was a driving force behind the development of the Las Vegas Strip. From the get-go, you see how Obsidian Entertainment didn’t just design a character faithful to a story; it quite literally went to the source. Benny existed, in some sense, in our world, which ultimately made him believable and relatable. Benny felt like he could exist, because he did, a version of him that is. This is the secret ingredient to memorable stories and one that, if you’re not careful, will make all of your characters and hard work forgettable.
The right improvements can only be called improvements if they make what’s there more obvious and true to the original intention, not the texture alone.
In this case, I left the painting rough and on purpose. This is because I’m testing directions of how Benny could be amplified as a character, whether we add more Bugsy or more of Matthew, and it helps decide what will be best before we make a decision. Another benefit of this is that we can hand this off to a 3D artist, and they can interpret and add their own value to the character rather than being strictly told which pixels to push into place. This collaborative nature ensures everyone has ownership of the project, enhances productivity and teamwork, and leads to better results as a team.
Reference and inspiration used for Benny’s remake. While there’s no remake planned for Fallout New Vegas, this has been yet another exercise for my mentorship classes while exploring different angles for students’ portfolios.
"Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs
Even though I never worked on Tomb Raider, Lara Croft is an example I like to bring up when teaching this to my mentored students because it is easy to summarize this theory.
Lara Croft is copyrighted by Crystal Dynamics, this image is solely for educational purposes.
You can see how the most recent version is closer to the source of an Adventurer. It wasn’t just about giving her HD textures.
See how she started, and how “adventure” was what Crystal Dynamics capitalized on, as the inspiration for her more recent designs.
Because the character was so old and pixelated, you have to ensure that the core feeling remains intact, rather than replaced. One gets you loved, the other makes your audience think you don’t get your own inventions.
If you’re working on a remake right now, is it building on what you built before, or just being updated with modern graphics? There is nothing wrong with either, but if games are story-focused, that’s one point you shouldn’t ignore.
Miguel Nogueira is a senior concept artist and art director for games and film. He’s collaborated with such studios as Sony PlayStation, NetEase Games, Embark Studios, and Ubisoft, to name a few. Currently, he assists AAA and AA studios as a freelancer, while working from his studio in the sunny Porto, Portugal.
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