Anyone who saw the dragon in the Skyrim trailer could be forgiven for thinking that dragons would only feature as occasional boss fights. That is not the case. Game director Todd Howard tells Norwegian magazine Gamer.no that there will be "an unlimited number of dragons" in the game. They'll be dynamically generated, and will be able to attack you almost anywhere.
The interview can be found in full on the Bethesda forums . Here's what he has to say about Skyrim's enormous scaly beasts.
"There is an unlimited number of dragons. One of our designers actually put in a random event I encountered, where I ended up being chased by three dragons and I thought "who the hell did this?"
"I felt like Frodo in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. So I asked him to remove it. But no, dragons are generated automatically (in addition to that there are a number of specific encounters, of course)."
Howard also explains a bit about why the team waited so long to bring dragons to the Elder Scrolls series. "For one thing, we think that it is a bit cliché," he says, "we have never seen a game dealing with dragons as Jurassic Park handles dinosaurs. We wanted to do it properly."
But why can't we talk to the dragons? Howard hints that in fact we might be able to, saying that "All dragons speak, it's actually what they do when they are spouting fire." adding that "there are some dragons who speak the "common tongue" and make themselves understood to people."
A chat with a dragon? Best dialogue tree ever. Check outs some of the spectacular Skyrim screenshots for a closer look at the game's new engine. Skyrim is out on November 11. Head over to the Skyrim site for more.
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Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.
