ARK Fantastic Tames - Dreadmare (DLC)

Let's be real about what this DLC is: a single creature unlock for ARK: Survival Ascended, sold separately, with a Steam review score sitting at a coin-flip 51% positive. The Dreadmare is the second entry in Studio Wildcard's Fantastic Tames premium series, and the community's split reaction is not hard to understand once you know what you're actually paying for. Whether the creature itself justifies a separate purchase is genuinely context-dependent, and I'd rather give you the honest read than a hype pitch. The Dreadmare is a night-exclusive flying carnivore, visually somewhere between a corrupted pegasus and a heavy metal album cover come to life, with glowing red eyes, bat-like wings, and a corrupted horn. It only spawns between roughly 8:30 PM and 5:30 AM in-game time, which immediately means your entire taming window is locked to the dark cycle. The taming process itself ditches the standard ARK knockout formula entirely. You kill a wild Dreadmare or Dreadstallion to loot its Dark Altar, place that altar at a safe distance from your base, and then feed it tribute items drawn from boss-fight materials like Sarcosuchus Skin, Spinosaurus Sail, or Giganotosaurus Heart. Each tribute summons a fresh Dreadmare you must defeat within a three-minute window. Miss the timer, a high-level creature tied to that tribute spawns and damages the altar. Miss three total tributes and the altar crumbles, and your tame is gone. It is genuinely one of the most involved taming rituals in the game, and not something you attempt before you have a mature base, alpha trophy stockpiles, and a solid combat mount. Once tamed, the Dreadmare earns its keep in a serious way. Its ability kit is built for debuff-heavy aerial combat: the Dark Wind attack fires ranged projectiles that siphon health and cancel enemy self-healing, the Aura of Hate drains everything nearby while healing the Dreadmare itself, and the Terror Shield reflects a portion of incoming damage back at the attacker. Full 360-degree flight control, including true strafing and reverse flight, gives it a real edge in PvP dogfights compared to most flyers. The Black Hole utility ability can pull a tame into a pocket dimension and recall it later, which opens up some creative logistics for tribe play. It also functions as a capable explorer mount, with generous base weight, health, and stamina stats that hold up past early-game use. The honest criticisms are real, though. Steam's mixed reception reflects genuine frustration with paying extra for a single creature in a game that already charges full price for an Unreal Engine 5 remaster. The taming ritual, while thematically interesting, is RNG-heavy: the altar can request the same tribute repeatedly, and if it calls for a Giganotosaurus Heart at the wrong moment and you're not stocked, things go sideways fast. There is currently no breeding mechanic to speak of. And the creature is night-only by design, which means on some maps you're working within a very specific window that may not align with your server's PvP schedule. This DLC makes sense if you are already deep in ARK: Survival Ascended, you play on PvP servers, and you want a combat mount that genuinely does things other flyers cannot. If you're a casual PvE player or still working through mid-game progression, the unlock cost and the taming wall will likely frustrate more than they reward. The creature is cool. The ritual is memorable. The price-to-content ratio is the sticking point.

Monika · Scout Team

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