2. Destructible Environs
Remember the opening scenes of Skyrim, where your character is being slowly driven in a cart toward Helgen, hands bound behind your back, as you are led to the axeman's chopping block for execution? Only then for a Dragon to swoop from behind a castle turret and turn the whole place to a crumpled pile of rubble, fire and brimstone with its fiery breath? Seeing Helgen laying in ruin, and then revisiting the scene of devastation later on our travels was a fun experience. It really helped exemplify the destructive nature of Dragons and made them feel like a ferocious enemy to fear later in the game. But then, in future encounters with the scaled beasts, they were relatively tame. They couldn't turn whole towns to ash, they couldn't blow the roof off a thatched hut, they couldn't turn streets to rubble. They just seemed far less potent an enemy. By featuring destructible environs, Bethesda would be improving Dragon combat tenfold by allowing them to turn whole towns to ruin (or at the very least set fire to rooftops, for goodness sake!) much like they would do in cinema and other media. Because Dragon's didn't feature this ability, they felt unrealistic.