A common game design interview question is, “what's a game you like and what can you improve in its systems?”. Let's talk about the monster hunter franchise and what do you think will improve it.

I think it's already a great franchise. Great gameplay loop. The earlier games felt a little rigid, but I think they fixed it with the inclusion of destructible environment and turf wars which is very cool since you can pull off very interesting interactions. I think maybe they can improve the turf wars by letting the monsters go at each other rather than a premade animation playing. or maybe like other monster interaction besides turf war. They can explore more the idea of the monster hunting/eating/drinking.

I like a lot of games. I don't have any interview upcoming for any job. It just came up to my mind and made me want to talk about the game design of Monster hunter.

Without details, there are too many cases of “figure out what the designer wanted”. Bosses with “this one is slashing, this one is piercing”, levels with “the designer must have been thinking about such-and-such”. There are many games where picking up certain elements are beneficial, and there are puzzle games where you need to solve the puzzle to move on, but doing them well is difficult. There must be a balance between where you can solve the puzzle or figure out the detail and feel like you have grown by solving it, versus where doing it feels like you're trying to guess what the designer did and don't feel the same emotional reward.

Just in case this does get used for interviews (by you or someone else prepping for the job) I won't be articulating specific cases, but there are plenty of them.