Right, yes. I think all I meant is that in earlier generations you could do modeling/sprites and concepting from the beginning, but there was a hard line in terms of how much code had to exist before the whole thing started to look or feel like much.

Thinking here especially of the Doom / Quake / HL1 era where they were basically building the level design tools in parallel with the game.

Whereas nowadays you can have movement, mobs, dialog flow, etc all with very little code, and it's placeholders like "oh we need a custom shader for this effect" or "that boss needs some custom logic".