Meet Fade, Valorant’s cerebral new agent

Season 3 of Valorant releases this week, and an exciting new agent is joining the fray.

Valorant’s new agent is Fade, a recon expert meant to give Sova some sneaky competition. According to Riot, she’s best in mid to close-range engagements and has no out-of-body skills. We’ll list all of her abilities below. Fade will be available alongside Valorant Season 3 on April 27, 2022.

Valorant Fade: Abilities and Overview

Haunt (E)

Equip a nightmarish entity. Press ‘fire’ to throw the orb, which plummets to the ground after a set time. Upon hitting the ground, the orb will reveal the location of enemies caught within its line of sight. The enemy team can destroy the entity, though players can re-use the ability to drop the projectile early in-flight.

Seize (Q)

Equip an orb of horrific ink. Press ‘fire’ to throw another orb that plummets to the ground after a set time. Once the orb hits the ground, it’ll explode into an inky mess and create a zone in which enemies cannot escape through normal means (if they’re caught within its radius). Players can re-use the ability to drop the projectile early in-flight.

Prowler (C)

Equip a Prowler. Press ‘fire’ to send the Prowler out, causing it to travel in a straight line. The Prowler will lock onto any enemies or trails in their frontal vision cone and chase them, nearsighting them if it reaches them. Hold the ‘fire’ key to steer the Prowler.

Nightfall (X)

Equip the power of Fear. Press ‘fire’ to send out a wave of nightmare energy that can pass through walls. The energy creates a trail to the opponent and deafens and decays them.

Check out Fade’s slick CGI trailer below. She’s pretty different from Neon, the previous agent.

Fade, VALORANT’s new Turkish Initiator Agent, is here to hunt you down. Go ahead, try to hide. pic.twitter.com/qcaVNMI7ZO

— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) April 24, 2022

Nicholas Smith, one of Valorant’s many designers, claims that figuring out how Fade’s trails work wasn’t easy.

“How the trails would work alongside many other agent utilities was definitely a challenge to figure out,” Smith said in a press release. “When enemies would teleport via ability or Bind teleporter what do we do? How would the trails actually get to their target (we had versions that started from Fade but felt that gave up a lot of synchronous information), how much visual noise to account for when all five were trailed, and how to best make this readable when there were many on-screen.”