Riot's Valorant lead character designer denied rumors that the next two playable agents would be named Crusader and Shatter.

These two agents were discovered in the game's files by Valorant Express data miners. Both names are recurring in the Valorant mining scene and appear in the files of both the closed beta and the production game; Shatter's main ability was to create clone decoys of himself, which we will explore later, while Crusader was rumored to be able to deploy shields was.

However, a tweet from Ryan 'Morello' Scott, lead character designer at Valorant, confirmed that neither Shatter nor Crusader are scheduled for release. He described them as "super old cancelled characters" and called Shatter in particular an "early prototype" in a previous Twitch feed.

The reason these two are still in the game files is because used assets refer to them in order to function. Deleting or renaming them may cause unexpected bugs because old assets may be reused or referenced as new assets. Therefore, deleting or renaming them may cause unexpected bugs. It is simply not worth the effort to select them.

Of course, there is no guarantee that these two characters will not reappear later in a significantly reworked form, but that we should not expect them in the foreseeable future.

Interestingly, Scott did not discard other rumors by Valorant Express, which found assets for two more agents known as "Killjoy" and "Bombshell" in the game's files. riot intends to release three Agents as part of the first "act" of the game, the first Agent being Reyna, who has already been released.

As with any leak or rumor, nothing is official until it is confirmed (or in this case denied) by Riot; Riot's current plan is to release a new Agent for each "act" of the game, with roughly a two-month interval. Since it was announced that Reyna will be joining the game on May 30, that means it will be at most a few weeks before we know who the next newcomer will be.