I suppose "software driven" ideology
is what brings us games like Doom 3, ie great tech, shame about the crappy game play.
Sounds to me like Western developers could learn a thing from the "design driven" folk over in Japan.
Acclaimed game designer Hideo Kojima says he's recruiting Western developers to add their software specialization expertise to the next entry in the Metal Gear series. With his keynote speech at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Kojima told gathered gamers he wants to blend a Western "software-driven" …
... an early 3D game that ran on 8-bit home computers. It had a proper 3D graphics engine, but took about a second to render a complete screen, and about three seconds to render a complete screen from a new viewpoint. However, the entire gameplay concept was designed around this "feature", and it worked.
It also featured fractally-generated world maps and passwords, seeded from the map number, because there would have been no room to store such things on the old cassette-based systems that most people had.