I posted the following lines as a reply in a poll, but I think the matter may deserve its own topic.

I've read many posts fearing dragons would be the new cliffracers. What I personally fear is that dragons could become the new dremora. That is, yet another there-to-be-killed hinder between you and the final, hopefully epic fight, with no culture, and no possibility of negotiation or trade.

From the lore, we learnt that dragons are intelligent beings. They have their own language, both spoken and written, which is not only a proof of intelligence beyond any possibility of doubt, but also fuels my hope they are given some crafting skills. As I said in another topic, I think no language may be considered as really existing, even in a fictional context, without the tales, stories and legends it is intended to be the vehicle for. Therefore, I think dragons must have a culture. Moreover, setting a dragon culture that the player is able to dicover would provide the game with, at least in my opinion, an incredible depth.

Part of many actual cultures is religion. Alduin is the dragon god, though it's still unclear to me whether He is the only one dragons worship. Even if this is the case, this doesn't mean there is a unique interpretation of His will, which is canonical and universally recognized as such among dragons. And even in this case, it would not be granted that every individual would follow Him regardless of His intents. No society can be monolithic.

Neither can individuals. The purpose of Bethesda when building Havok Behaviour was, I think, to make the living beings in the game more believable - which is somewhat of a necessary condition for immersion. But if dragons appears to be merely scaly bags of blood and anger whose only purpose in life is to destroy everything moving around in general, and the Dovakhiin in particular, they wouldn't be, in my opinion, very believable. Of course, some of them may want to see you dead (it's always cool [or warm, hum :flamed: ] to fight against a dragon), but I hope besides these ones, there will be dragons that are, perhaps not friendly, but at least non-hostile. For example, there could be peacefull dragons that want to know what happenned to the world during their centuries-long absence, simply showing neutral interest for men's and mer's business.

I hope dragon will be complex beings with their own individual story, background, and purposes, very intelligent beings able to manipulate people and crowds, perhaps even willing to play some role in Skyrim's politics. It would be nice, also, to see dragon questgivers, for example apostates that accept to give you some pieces of information about Alduin if you do something for them as a counterpart.

I also hope there will be more possible, perhaps more peaceful, outcomes for the confrontations with dragons than the traditional I-dead-or-you-dead thing. For example, it would be nice to see a dragon mother landing on the main place of a city, burning a big tree and shout that her egg has been stolen by smugglers, and that either she recovers it within two days, or she and her husband will come back and it will be seen whether anybody could prevent two dragons having nothing more to lose to share their despair. Not only would this kind of stuff create a poisonous sphere in the city due to people trying to find the thieves, but it would also give the player more choice about how he or she wants to deal with the confrontation. Of course, oviparity of dragons lies in the realm of hypothesis, but what I mean is that I hope to be surprised by dragons in many more ways than only due to the way they fight, or the powers they own.

It has been said that there would be far more uniqueness in Skyrim than in Oblivion, which I think is very good news. So I hope this statement will also hold true for dragons.
And my point is that dragons' uniqueness shouldn't originate only from their visual appearance or particular individual powers, but also in the targets they aim at, in their hopes and fears, in their intents and behaviors.

Do you agree with this?

What are your hopes and fears about Skyrim's dragons?

I got more of the impression from interviews and such that they were more of colossal mammoths of destruction for the most part, rather than beastly NPCs. They do have their own lore and worship though - there's the whole Dragon Born scenario and the Dragon Shouts (can't quite recall the name of the group). I definitely don't think they'll be the new Daedra though - Daedra were a dime a dozen in Oblivion. One or two Dragons can destroy a whole village on their own, so I doubt they'll send them in tiresome waves like the Daedra.

I'm going to try and keep an open mind about them, though. It'll be interesting to see the way they take it. Of course, in the end, I think they'll still (either way) be something to both fear and be in awe of. I imagine if I randomly stumble across one, I'll squeal like a little girl and try to run the other way before it notices me...

My real big hope though is that they have a few different models and such for the dragons, so they don't feel so cookie-cutter instances. Dragons are special - let them look it!

I do actually hope that dragons come off as a race of intelligent beings with their own culture, and not just obstacles for the player to kill, yes. This doesn't necessarily mean that we have to encounter non-hostile dragons, whether that should happen or not depends on whether it makes sense in the story, but we should at least get to learn about the dragons, their culture, and so on. Basically, I hope we get lots of lore on them. Dragons should feel like they're actually a part of the world, with a reason for being how they are and doing what they do, even if that's only tryingf to destroy the world, that's an important part of making them feel believable and avoiding making them come of as just being evil for the sake of providing an antagonist to the story, which could very well happen if it's never explained WHY they want to destroy the world.

The fact that Bethesda went out of their way to create a langauge for the dragons sounds like a good sign, though, as it means that Bethesda is actually putting some thought into dragons rather than just throwing them in because they know people like them. Not that I doubt Bethesda decided to do dragons because they're popular, but I get the impression that Bethesda might be trying to make the dragons in Skyrim feel different from everyone else's, if that's the case, then I could see Skyrim having the most interesting and unique dragons I've seen in a video game in quite some time, I hope I'm right on that.

Of course, no matter how they'll handled, I think they'll at least be less repetitive than Dremora due to being fewer in number, and will always be a dangerous foe, I hope that's the case, at least.

Speaking of Dremora, I really hope they're in the game. They're my favorite Daedra monster.

Todd Howard has a spoken a lot about how Bethesda wants to do dragons differently than most other places that they see dragons in. Most places have dragons just be giant monsters who kill things. Todd has mentioned specifically that he wants them to be more intelligent and things like that. I don't think we need to worry too much. They might not be what you're asking for but I think we're guaranteed that they'll be something rather unique.

well i've seen it mentioned several times that dragons WILL speak...

they did mention it in some articles that dragons do NOT look mechanical at all, when they are flying, SPEAKING, etc...

so im sure we'll see some dragons that will talk... but no guarantee it'll be friendly.