The paths were not that intuitive, the aiming was useless, and there wasn’t that much feeling of life in the game. Which is a shame, because had I been looking from their perspectives, I probably would have been much more involved! I’m pretty sure there was some other niggle that meant we put it down, it might just have been the more immediately compelling alternatives.

It makes me wonder about levels that are made to look good from a distance, and whether that kind of design might be better suited to mmos, where you can actually stand and watch other players doing this stuff, then when doing them yourself, replay that viewpoint you enjoyed before.

Concepts are initial to designing a level, but usually the concept artist is creating the look and feel of the level, and not the design. At least by what I saw in this movie clip.
Basing their design off of the picture they received, it seems like the designers aren’t actually coming up with ‘gameplay areas’ (levels) and are instead just planning a route that they think looks interesting off of artwork. I do the same whenever I look at MC Escher’s artwork Relativity, but that doesn’t mean I actually designed or created a level with gameplay in mind.