I think what we have here is a failure to communicate.

When you say 'artist', you seem to be thinking about really creative guys holed up in some conference room, spending all day with paintbrushes and canvas to produce alien landscape and character designs, which are later realized by people who sit at computers.

When I say artist, I mean art. Every damn thing you see when you play a game is the product of an artist. Models, textures, the main menu, etc.

Programmers are the people who build the game. Maybe they create tools for the artists, in that they implement shaders and particle effects.

: A concept
: artist's job isn't to figure out the polygon count, and reduce their pen
: strokes so that the visual can be translated without issue.

Hypothetically speaking, if they're drawing sprawling vistas that don't translate into something that is fun to play through, they need to go back and try it again.
And yes, a major problem with AAA games these days is that the skybox and distant environment is great to look at, but the play area is an ugly, muddled mess.

: Obviously, the default task could be altered by limiting factors - like a
: reduced development team where a concept artist has to double as a
: programmer or graphic artist or some such. But a concept artist? No
: final-hardware-based limitation on creativity.

Then the art he produces is useless to the rest of the team, except as motivational posters to hang in the halls.

: I'd say yes, it would be helpful. There are "artists" throughout
: the development cycle. Ideally, the concept artist should be creatively
: freed from shackles, and further down the line their vision is optimized
: and realized by other artists whose specialty is graphic design and/or
: programming (or perhaps shed altogether and redesigned apart from the
: concept artist, who knows)

If we can use Halo Wars as an example, the earliest (?) concept art was mostly sweeping battlescapes, with UNSC infantry fleeing from colossal Scarab walkers. Later, more useful concept art was the technical stuff, like designs for the destructible Forerunner ruins in the level Scarab.

: Um... no?
: I don't know who decided to put the "garbage" into the game, do
: you?

I highly doubt it was the code jockeys.

: Whether it
: was artists further down the line, or programmers who felt they could just
: increase the asset count.

Programmers. Don't. Create. Art.
If they tweaked a game engine so it could handle more special effects than the previous games, it was still up to the artists to use those tools well.

: Let's go back to what I said above.
: Concept Artist != Graphic Artist != Programmer. There may be more roles in a
: development team, there may be fewer. I'm just throwing out positions for
: the sake of this point.

: Concept Artist - no limitation on imagination.
: Graphic Artist - translate or be inspired by concepts to create digital
: content, optimized to work within the known bounds of the hardware and
: software's capability. Programmer - Make It All Work. Well.
: But if you're arguing semantics on that first one - "no limitation"
: is an "output standard".

Oh. Hey.
Um... that clarifies some things...

That said, concept artists need to be faced with some limitations, whether it be "Design armor that doesn't look like crap in bad lighting" or "Design a vista that's fun to fight across, and not a muddy mess in first person perspective."

: The standard is: go nuts, be creative,
: be imaginative; we'll whittle it down as we find out what our game can
: handle. Or bring it back towards the vision if we find there's room to
: improve at any point.

Y'see, that's the standard "Shoot for the moon" mentality, and it's not the way I was taught. What I was taught is probably best summed up as a constant cycle of "What do you need to do? What are you capable of doing? Act. Improve."

: If the programmers were not tasked with creating the visual esthetic, and
: they 'messed' with an accepted design, then I wouldn't blame the artist
: for being upset. nonononono, that's not how it was supposed to look! IF
: it was programmers who dropped the 'garbage' into the game just because
: they could, then there may well be artists shaking their head.

And I can't see that happening any more than I can see the UI designer sneaking into Chris Schlerf's office, rewriting the script, and that's what made it into Halo 4.
"Oh, no, the Didact wasn't supposed to come across as a senile pastiche of a C-list Marvel villain. That just happened."

: IF it was
: any artist along the line, then who knows. Everyone on the team may have
: thought the 'garbage' was a good addition, but it ended up being the
: players and community that didn't like it. Hey, that happens. :P

Groupthink. It's a terrible thing to behold.

: Looks like many of the designs though are relatively simplistic (reflective
: of the final product), and so either the initial vision was that eg
: Forerunner style IS geometrically simplistic (and more recent 'busier'
: designs have changed that original intent), or the artists were informed
: to not be too complex due to hardware limitations (and more recent
: 'busier' designs may be in line with what initial style visions implied,
: but weren't 'allowed' to depict). *shrug*

Given how simple Forerunner styles stayed until Halo 4, I'd say that simple and monolithic was the design intent, regardless of how powerful the graphical engine was.

: At least they didn't resort to matte painting use if the concept art is too
: complex to implement :P (though, skyboxes could really be considered a
: form of matte painting; or like Doom's sky ).

Oh, yes they did.

Remember the cutscene of the Infinity flying through the clouds and crashing in the distance? 100% matte painting. I seem to recall seeing a WIP video of it, and it was clear that the effect would fall flat* if the camera was a few meters to either side.

*Badump tish!

: One could look at the way 343 did Halo 4 levels, and the lack of theater, as
: a result of attempting to realize more of the Halo 4 artistic
: vision/detail (love it or hate it), at the expense of freedom to explore.
: Of course, a controversial design choice.

I've got my own theories. None of them charitable.