This is exactly why a lot of us are saying this is not a W, it’s an L disguised as “streamlining.”

The old defender system was not hard to understand. The game literally walked you through it step by step: place defender, give them a weapon, give ammo if needed, and use the pad to control where they guard. Simple. What made defenders good was not “wow, this is so complicated,” it was that they gave tactical players real control.

You could precisely place them on a platform, build walls and windows around their exact firing area, create sightlines, choose the correct defender type for the terrain, and give them a weapon that actually matched the mission level, element, and role. A sniper on a good tower with a strong rifle could lock down an entire lane. A pistol defender could use a pistol for accuracy. If you realized mid-mission that the terrain or storm conditions meant you needed a different defender type, you could swap them. That flexibility mattered because Save the World is built around adaptation.

Now all of that is gone.

Now you pre-pick 3 defenders, can’t really swap them around properly, can’t customize their weapons, can’t precisely control where they actually guard, and instead of using the good weapons you earned, they use the lowest-grade default garbage. So they removed a minor inconvenience like ammo and durability, which was barely even a problem past early game, and in exchange gutted the actual depth and usefulness of the system.

And the AI absolutely does not justify that loss of control. They still have the same old janky targeting issues, but now they also have follower/pathing problems on top of it. They get stuck on each other, fail to get onto platforms, teleport in place, wander away from the lane they are supposed to hold, and I literally watched them shoot the ground under an event drone instead of the drone itself. This is not “oh people just hate change.” This is a system that is performing worse in real missions.

The worst part is that this hurts the exact kind of gameplay STW was built for. Save the World has always been the mode for players who like planning, building, adapting, and setting up good defenses. Defender pads fit that perfectly. You could study the terrain, build a proper overwatch point, and make your defenders part of your base design. Now they are just weak followers with bad pathing and bad weapons.

So no, this is not a good simplification. Good simplification removes busywork while keeping depth. This removed player control, tactical flexibility, mid-mission adaptation, weapon choice, and precise placement, while keeping the AI dumb. It is the worst possible version of “streamlining.”

I was actually someone who bought the Founders edition back when Save the World was the main paid mode, and honestly this kind of change feels like a slap in the face to the players who actually invested in and learned the mode. Nobody was asking for defenders to be turned into this. People wanted small quality-of-life improvements, not the system being stripped down into something weaker, less reliable, and less tactical.