This series of articles might help you picture how a game could be architected without inheritance: http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2014/08/building-data-oriented

This series of articles might help you picture how a game could be architected without inheritance: http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2014/08/building-data-oriented-entity-system.html http://bitsquid.blogspot.com/2014/08/building-data-oriented-... A couple of commercial games have been built on that engine and it was recently sold to Autodesk, so it's not just handwaving.