Before the ranting, spoilers ahead for the story line of Elsweyr! This is just about the story campaign. While I also hate the open world gameplay since it further diminishes the dragons and makes
the Dragonguard as irrelevant as possible.

First, I played all single player Elder Scrolls games, but usually only for 30 hours before losing interse. I love the "old" Elder Scrolls online so much, I played through it all with one charakter and got almost all classes at 50. I love the quest design and enjoyed almost all campaign storylines (except the guild addons with their grinding to stop you from blasting through in 3 hours).

When Elsweyr was anounced and it was supposed to include dragons, I was stunned and full of joy and hope. But high expectations are always dangerous.

Now I work for the game industry, so I know you need handcrafted content and systemic content, because you can not create enough quests, to keep ahead of the players, that's why you have the dragonhunts. This is in itself okay, BUT... Having the Fighters Guild asking you to join their daily dragonhunt to kill five dragons, makes dragons just another world boss, irrelevant and farmable. Non epic to the extreme. It could be a giant skeever or a dragon, there is no difference. Flying up and demanding you to do some extra sport doesn't change that. When you can replace a dragon with a deadric titan, then you know you screwed up big time.

So much for open world.

But I was here for the story quests (Most normal quests are good up to great, drunk cat magician for the win). They put way to many story arcs in these few quests. The ork necromancer was a dunb idea and he was completely uninteresting. His part could have been completely taken over by the sister of Abnur Tharn and it would have been way better, giving that character more development.
The real Sir Cadwell was also a waste, told in the most boring way and he was offed way too fast, leaving a bad taste in my mouth. I was so exited about that plot.
This should have been it's own thing and not cramped into the dragon storyline.

Yeah, the dragon story line. Talking to Mulaamnier gave me a good feeling. Yeah, dragons were important to that story, there would be a lot of dialogue and probably one of the dragons had second thoughts...who knows where this plot will take me.

Then you kill your first dragon. Well a ballista kills it basically, but you are pulling the trigger, doing 3 million damage!!!
At this point I was like.. if the rest of this questline is you killing dragons left and right with a flipping ballista and then just giving that what is left a mercy killng, I will deinstall that flipping game.
Fortunately it was the only time, BUT... You might have seen the foreshadowing in the second trailer. Yes, that was crap. It looked good, but the story goes like this: Epic heroes fight a dragon but then a crew of unnamed and irrelevant soliders just kill it with a single ballista bolt. That's how you do it, noobs, they shout.

This first kill of a dragon is an Austin Powers moment, in which the two main dragons basically say: We expect everything to go well for us and leave now, we have more unimportant things to do.

There were no more dialogues with dragons. Somwhere in the middle, but way too early Tharns sister gets killed by you in an underwhelming fight, this is the last time we have to deal with dragons till the very end... Yes, you will here and there get to hear that there were totally dragons outside and that Abnur shoo shooed them away, epic!

Then you have the final fight. In which you fight ice elementals and some other adds which you know from previous expansions and every wave you blow a magic dragon horn, until the Mulaamnier is almost dead from you bad performance and kills himself before hearign any more music from you.

Kaalgrontiid turns out to be a critic too and spins out into space, the end.

The epic dragon battle is a mob wave battle with a short interaction in the end. It's like you are using a shrink ray to make the dragon smaller and smaller, which is fueled by mob life energy.
In the end the dragon is cut down to size, so you can have an...extremely unepic battle with it...yay.

The comes the prolog to Dragonhold and guess what. The battle against the smartest dragon in the whole storyline so far is an almost exact copy of the end boss fight... it's hillariouly bad.

Final words: All dragons are large dum dums, they are all one dimensional characters without any personality, completely interchangeable. The plan to bring the Dragonguard back is so hillarious too, because the Fighters Guild is like...We got it all under control. 2 Million dragons killed so far, you can get back to sleep, the dragons are just large target dummies.

If the open world dragons couldn't be killed but would only fight until they flee, making them too strong for mere mortals to kill them migth have helped to keep them from jsut turning into another
boring monster.

I won't be playing Dragonhold, I've screamed enough at my monitor