In the past, video game characters on the N64, PlayStation, and Dreamcast appeared to be the same age. The graphics were not good enough to display wrinkles or age lines. Now, however, with the release of Unreal Engine 5, PS5, and other current-generation graphics, we are able to properly age characters to whatever age we desire. This has led to classic characters aging alongside their remakes.

In the remake of Silent Hill 2, James Sunderland is the most recent illustration of this. In a chat with IGN Japan, Motoi Okamoto, the franchise producer, showed how the original game was limited in capabilities, causing James to be represented as a younger person. However, the newest remake enables Bloober Team to give James a more believable age.

Ito and Okamoto both concluded that they should increase James' age in their game, as it has been over two decades since his original debut and the typical age of game players have both gone up. They need to portray James as a grown man who has experienced more in his life, therefore, though it was only a tiny bit, they elected to raise his age.

It was impossible to make skin appear realistically during the Play Station 2 era, since everyone ended up looking too young or having flawless skin. But, now that we have advanced to the Play Station 4 and Play Station 5 time period, it is possible to display people’s actual ages, such as a senior, someone in the middle age group, a person in their thirties, and so forth.

Okamoto stated, If someone looks maturer to you, that’s not just your imagination.

James will include full performance capture, which adds facial expressions to the realistic movements done by an actor. This gave developers the ability to provide a more in-depth representation of emotion than was able to be done in the first version. Despite the impressive action sequences seen in the trailer, there are also gentler scenes with meaningful performances.