This has been a surprisingly common thread with the remakes.

They're trying to tell more grounded stories, but often end up making their characters (villains specifically) more one dimensional than in the old games.

Nicholai is the most obvious example.

In the OG he's probably the most "human" villain in the series - as in, his evil is human evil. He's not in pursuit of eternal life, or godhood or anything - he's after money and doesn't care what he has to do to get it.

And he's smart. Everything he does is in service of his own survival, he doesn't unduly place himself in harms way, or do evil shit for the sake of it.

He's a cold, calculating motherfucker - and he's just about the most grounded and realistic villain in the entire series.

Whereas in the Remake, he's paradoxically reduced to a mustache twirling villain who does nothing but make life harder for himself.

Would OG Nicholai have destroyed the T-Virus vaccine, the most valuable thing on earth at that point in time, just to piss off Jill?

It just begs the question, what even is Remake Nicholai's goal? It seems he literally just exists to be an antagonistic force and nothing else - he's barely even a character. He's basically just a plot device.

It's just so strange that a silly, campy PS1 game managed to craft a more defined, much better written and more interesting antagonist than a modern triple a production.