Two guys logically explain why The Boss, a middle-aged war veteran, does not look like a 20-year-old e-girl
Gamers: Well she should look like one anyway
I'm so tired 
It's so fucking stupid, she looks pretty much exactly like the original character but in a photo-realistic style
Holy shit, I somehow missed the most unhinged comment:
[CW: Transphobia]
spoiler
They made the boss look trans and that's a fucking crime.
The chin is different, it looks like a man's chin, the mouth is different, it looks like a man's mouth, more specifically it looks like Chris Chan's mouth, don't believe me, go do an image search. Neither the mouth or the chin or the brow or forehead or zygomatic process feminine in any way in the remake version.
The boss has deep cheek hollows because they changed her maxilla as well, literally everything they did was to make the Boss look like a ******.
Their brains are so fucking cooked
I'm willing to give a pass to StevenCBlah here because without further info I'm fully on board. That's fucked from start to finish. Why's she a brunette now? Why's her face all different? It's not like they just fidelity-updated her and made her look older, it's an entirely different person.
Also the lighting sucks ass now. That was an artistic choice!
Look closer: the structure is identical between them, it's just that things like the eyes and mouth have shifted shape slightly to accommodate an increase in detail, looking more like an actual face and less like a low-detail cartoon caricature designed to be clear and readable on a low-res screen. Her eyes also don't seem to be fully open on that exact frame which is creating a further illusion of difference, and that's 100% down to the fact that they can actually animate things like partially closing eyes against bright light now.
It's not though! I feel like this thread is collectively gaslighting themselves on the basis of hating gamers (which, fair!), but c'mon.
Her face is a good bit narrower, her lips are wider, as are her eyebrows, she's turned brunette from blonde, her chin got smaller / more rounded (OG Boss had some Chin Krimson going on there)
The cheekbones and nose they got mostly right
Ignore all the skin details: the jawline, cheekbones, brow, and nose are identical between them. The eyes looked slightly different but I think it's just that they're partially closed. The only real difference is that the mouth is slightly wider, and that's both extremely minor and probably down to the artist not prioritizing that when remaking the model for photorealism. The rest of the seeming differences look like illusions resulting from the skin texture.
This is probably the most closely matched redesign I've ever seen: all the permanent structural bits of the face are the same between them with all the slight differences being soft tissue, the styling and coloring of hair, and the animation of muscles that the original lacked.
Actually, looking at it again, 99% of the difference is makeup. The left face looks like the right face with makeup.
Either you are going nuts or I am because those two portraits are looking nothing like each other
I'm dying laughing now that I've realized the difference is a box of hair dye, a bottle of foundation, and some blush. Also the original is like this soft-focus 3-point studio lighting that further amplifies the effect. Like you could literally recreate these two pictures with one actual person: take the right picture in harsh sunlight without makeup, then they dye their hair, put on the foundation and contouring shit, then retake the photo with shade and reflectors set up all around and the camera slightly unfocused and it's that exactly.
Now I get why you're missing it though, if you've never done makeup or looked too close at how it works and the theory of what one does with it.
The hair colour and lighting especially here makes my point - why change it? Does everything have to be realistic grim dark now as if modern technology couldn't reproduce soft focus 3 point studio lighting? We can't make characters blond anymore?
I don't care whether it's hot or whatever I'm just genuinely wondering what the point is to change the character so much. Like if you'd reimagine it, go hog wild, but this is Konami after kicking out Kojima, they're not gonna change shit about the golden cow that is MGS3
To match set and environmental design and how that's shifted with rendering technology? The original has this "overcast day diffuse lighting, supplemented by reflectors and artificial lights" kind of look, the remake looks like a normal day - that says the intent with the original was not "everything is always cloudy and diffuse in a way that's just perfect for photography" and that was just a concession to the lighting and shadow rendering tech of the day.
As for hair, who knows, though I'd guess based on the way the hair is nearly identical where the light is harshest they may have decided that changing it actually makes it match the look more: compensating for the brighter lighting and the lighting interacting with the hair by darkening it so it's brought back to the same level. The original hair tone was likely washed out and wound up looking white with the modern lighting engine, or something like that.
Don't worry there's a piss filter option available for people who don't want to just boot up the recently released master collection.
They're jumping ahead 3 console generations and shifting the artstyle so their faces are bound to change. I don't think I've ever seen a realistic 3D remake where the human characters' faces didn't end up looking different from the originals, especially with modern games where they base the character models on real humans
I don't see why you have to shift the artstyle in the first place but even removed from that I don't think this counts as anything near a faithful adaption of the old face. This is a re-imagining, which can be discussed on it's own terms, but it clearly does not look like the boss anymore. Her not looking old I'm happy to blame on PS2-Era limitations because you either look like that or The Pain, the rest of it is absolutely done on purpose.
Photorealism is the norm in AAA action games. Looking at Kojima's recent stuff I'm pretty sure it's what he would've gone for too if he was making the game today. I love the look of MGS 2 and 3, but it is what it is (Not MGS4 though, the stylised anime faces with more realistic skin detail and rendering didn't sit well with me)
The Boss and the other characters we've seen so far don't look 100% identical to their PS2 counterparts but they're easily recognisable to me. Like I said, realistic human video game characters often get facelifts when they move between hardware generations
Why?
Because gamers will complain your game looks like Minecraft otherwise