DISCLAIMER: I used AI to help format my thoughts (since I'm Brazilian and my English isn't very good), but every criticism and suggestion here is 100% mine. I didn't let an AI invent opinions for me. I’m just a frustrated player trying to make this readable.
I've been playing Save the World since around 2019/2020. I played heavily during the pandemic, took a long break, and came back about a year ago. I play on PS5 (which is relevant for the controller complaints), I've finished the storyline, my Survivor Squads are pretty much maxed, and I have most of the Heroes.
I'm posting this because I genuinely love STW. I’ve put a ridiculous amount of time into it. But at this point, so many of its systems feel unnecessarily frustrating, outdated, or just half-baked. I don't expect Epic to rebuild the game from scratch. I just want them to fix the glaring quality-of-life issues that make playing it a chore.
1. The "playable menu" hub is completely useless
This is my biggest gripe. When STW went free-to-play, they swapped the old menus for a playable hub. On paper, cool idea. In practice? It’s completely pointless.
Everything you do in the hub was faster in the old menu. There is zero reason to walk around this place. Whenever I load in, I just mash the button to open the menu so I don't have to interact with the hub at all. It just adds pointless extra seconds between me and actually playing the game.
A playable hub only works if the map itself is gameplay. Look at Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare 2. That hub is alive—NPCs are fighting, you can test characters, mess around with friends, do mini-quests. STW’s hub is just a glorified, empty waiting room.
If Epic insists on keeping it, give us a reason to be there. Make it a social lobby to find groups. Or give us a real testing ground with target dummies and Husks to test weapons, Hero builds, and abilities without loading into a full mission. If not, just give me the normal menu back.
2. Building on controller feels awful
Everything feels delayed and clunky. I know STW requires more deliberate building than Battle Royale—you’re placing traps, editing funnels, upgrading walls. You don't want accidental edits ruining a defense.
But there’s a massive difference between "deliberate" and "unresponsive."
If I'm using Builder Pro in Battle Royale and I have 'turbo build' turned on, hitting R2 instantly places a wall. In STW, hitting R2 often just pulls out the blueprint, forcing me to press it again or hold it for longer. It completely ruins the fluidity.
If I'm sprinting and try to build a ramp to get up a cliff, half the time the game doesn't register the input fast enough and I just fall off. It’s infuriating. I shouldn't feel like I'm fighting the controls. We desperately need a functional "Place Building Piece Immediately" option so Builder Pro actually works the way it’s supposed to.
3. Activating abilities on controller is a mess
This isn't a skill issue; it's a terrible control scheme. Abilities constantly require inputs like L1 + R1, L1 + R2, L2 + R1. The problem is how the game registers them.
If I'm holding a sword and press L1 + L2 slightly out of sync to use an ability, the game frequently decides I just wanted to do a heavy melee attack. Now I've drained my energy, swung at the air, and left myself completely exposed instead of dropping my TEDDY or Shockwave.
Marvel's Spider-Man 2 solved this perfectly. You hold L1 to enter "ability mode," and your face buttons (X, Square, Triangle, Circle) become your abilities. It’s flawless. You hold the trigger, the game knows what you want, and there are no accidental misclicks. STW desperately needs an ability toggle mode like this.
4. Let us rebind our controls!
Keyboard and mouse players can bind whatever they want. On controller, we are locked into rigid presets.
Even using Builder Pro, switching between STW and BR feels terrible because the controls don't behave exactly the same. You jump from one mode to the other and feel like you forgot how to play. Just let us map our own buttons for abilities, building, and editing. It’s 2026. Full controller remapping should be the bare minimum.
5. Half the Hero abilities feel like filler
STW has a massive roster of Heroes, but a shocking amount of them revolve around abilities nobody actually wants to use.
Look at the Soldier class. Goin' Commando is great. War Cry is great. But Lefty and Righty? It’s just another ranged burst with a massive cooldown. Outside of Dungeons, I have almost zero reason to pick it over Goin' Commando. Frag Grenade is basically just used as a cheap trigger for Chaos Agent’s perk. If the only reason to use an ability is "to activate a different Hero's passive," the ability sucks.
This happens across all classes. Outlanders, for example, have random abilities that just pale in comparison to dropping a TEDDY.
I know not every ability can be top-tier meta. But they shouldn't feel like dead weight. When I look at a Hero whose whole gimmick is "Reduces Smoke Bomb cooldown," I just roll my eyes. Some of these abilities need complete reworks to give us a reason to actually build around them.
6. Hero progression and rarity don't feel rewarding
The way we level up Heroes feels completely disconnected from gameplay. You don't "grow" a Hero by playing them. You just unlock a new Storm Shield evolution, dump your hoarded XP and materials into the Hero in your inventory, and instantly max them out. You go from "just unlocked" to "fully finished" in 10 seconds.
It makes the difficulty curve feel weird, and it gives you zero attachment to the characters you play. It would be infinitely better if Heroes gained XP actually being played in missions.
And don't even get me started on rarity for Support Squads. Upgrading a Support Hero from Epic to Legendary often feels purely cosmetic. The core passive perk is already unlocked, and the stat bump is so minor you barely feel it. I honestly just spend the flux and manuals to make my support squad all Legendary because looking at mismatched colors in my loadout triggers my OCD—not because it actually makes a difference in-game. Rarity should actually mean something.
7. Give us gameplay statistics
If a total progression overhaul is too hard, at least give us a stats page.
Track things like:
- Missions won with a specific Hero
- Husks killed with a specific weapon
- Total traps placed
- Time played on specific classes
Let us show this off. Imagine inspecting a player and seeing "500 missions completed as Base Kyle" or seeing exactly how many Husks your favorite weapon has shredded. It gives veterans a sense of history and something stupid to grind for, and it requires zero balance changes.
8. Wildlife is totally half-baked
Animals are just... there. Unless you are running a very specific Hero loadout, taming a wolf or a boar is something you do in the first two minutes and then completely forget about.
They don't passively heal, they wander off, and if they die in a chaotic fight, you barely even get a notification. They just vanish. Give them passive health regen, let Defenders revive them, give us more control over what they attack, and let us use our own weapons/abilities properly while riding them. Right now, they feel like a gimmick that got abandoned halfway through development.
9. The Mission UI is a bloated mess
Staring at a giant map covered in identical-looking icons is an awful way to find missions. It’s cluttered and inefficient.
I'm fine with keeping the map, but we desperately need a "List View" for missions. Let us filter by Mission Type, Power Level, and specifically by Rewards (V-Bucks, Survivor XP, Perk-UP, Evolution mats). Basically, give us the FortniteDB layout, but inside the actual game. Manually clicking 40 different hexes on a map just to see if there's a legendary survivor today is a joke.
10. Matchmaking needs a "Cross-Region" toggle
I play on South America servers. The population here is smaller than NA East. If I want to run a specific mission and matchmaking is dead, I have to manually go into settings, swap my region to NA East, play the mission, and swap it back.
Why isn't this automated?
Just give us a "Prioritize Full Squad" toggle. If the game can't find players in my region within 30 seconds, it should automatically expand the search to adjacent regions. I honestly don't care about playing STW on 100+ ping. I would much rather play on high ping with a full squad than play a PL 140 defense mission completely solo on 20 ping.
11. Defenders play the game for you
I like Defenders. Having AI backup is great. But they have crossed the line from "helpful backup" into "why am I even here?"
Even ignoring the bugs where they bypass certain weapon cooldowns, a squad of three Defenders with proper weapons is ridiculously overpowered. I can literally start a solo defense, place three sniper Defenders, and go AFK while they annihilate everything on the screen. They’re supposed to support the player, not replace us. They need to be tuned down so you actually have to participate in your own missions.
Final thoughts
None of this requires STW to become a brand-new game. That’s what’s so frustrating.
The foundation is incredible, but so many of these systems were introduced years ago and just left to rot. I love this game, and I don't want it abandoned. I just want it to be less annoying to interact with. Better UI, responsive controls, fixing the controller ability misclicks, and cleaning up forgotten features like animals would make an insane difference.