Well, as far as style goes it’s certainly more likely I:B will be able to top E:D. As it is now, it’ll be tough, but I can’t help but feel it’ll become easier as new versions of E:D are released to the public.
Why?
Artists, like all creative individuals (I’m including programmers, carpenters, and lobbyists in that, btw), tend to want to test their limits. In the first three Elite games, as well as in SC, those limits were very clearly defined as “anything you can possibly think of that works in this cutting edge graphical engine!” (even today one of the Elites gets a paragraph in most books on 3D rendering). Whether the results were distinctive is certainly subjective, but personally I tend to agree with “meh”.
In E:D’s early versions, the limit was instead “look at the models from the original games, recreate them, then do anything you can possible think of that works in this really not bad graphical engine to improve them” - a reduction in artistic freedom by 6-10 orders of magnitude, going by Moore’s law.
Once they’re done recreating the originals, though, do they return to their original design philosophy, or do they try to force themselves to mimic the results of a decades old style? If the latter, and if the INovae artists keep a very tight rein on themselves (yet somehow remain creative), I:B could win out on distinctiveness.
From what I’ve seen so far, though… well, it started out as being a free for all completely volunteer we’ll sort out the legals later, is now volunteer with some entry restrictions, and it shows. Most of the models seem less like “pick a faction, design something that looks like it’d work” and more like “design something, try to fit it to a faction, figure out how it might work”. Still looks cool, just not as distinctive as I would expect from a collection of superhuman genius game artists.
Though I am by no means an authority on the subject.
