in the next DLC, i dont see how it could work because the texture pop in and the game pausing for a few seconds while the surroundings load is already bad enough while just walking, let alone riding a dragon across skyrim. Theres no way i can see draon riding being smooth and bug free. I can just imagine mountains and lakes just appearing before our eyes while flying over them on a dragon.

perhaps you won't be able to fly in tamriel but just in solstheim .... or perhaps they are redoing the lods of the cities ....

Or perhaps the references are mere references to another scripted flight.

According to something posted in the Solstheim DLC thread, Dragon Riding takes place within its own worldspace - it offers better distant land textures and such, likely at the cost of details on the ground.

completly random and possibly unrelated:

if you kill a dragon and wait for him to start burning. wait for the full body burn part of his death and then open the map. if you do it right, you can see a speck of yellow and orange where the dragon is burning.

essentially the map is actually nothing more than a HUGE zoom out of skyrim. and i dont mean the image you see because thats obvious. lol. i mean its literally nothing more than a zoom out with icons added. its not a seperate map or anything.

Done that before, Still would be cool to ride dragons anyhow.

my point is they have the means to make things small and still function. so dragon riding as far as i can tell is very doable.