The game and its current state

[Enkidoh]

I use The Secret World as a comparison to this game a lot. Its story and side stories blows FFXIV's out of the water in my opinion if we want to compare MMO storylines. The quests themselves are more unique too in their formula. There are investigation quests that actually require research outside the game (such as one requiring you to figure out that you're supposed to scan a bar code, another where you have to translate morse code, etc).

Firstly, I think you're confusing the quality of the narrative with how the storyline is relayed to the player in the form of quests, because the two are totally different concepts. It seems to me your problem is how the quest system in FFXIV holds your hand with telling you where to go and what to do, rather than just giving you a basic hint and leaving it up to you to figure out yourself. In other words, like FFXI's style of questing:



That is no exaggeration - that is exactly how FFXI's story and quests were handled.

Although some might find that style of questing to be fun, really in practice it turned out not to work quite so well - all it does is drive players to look up online guides for the information, inevitably leading it inaccurate and incomplete information as people struggle to find out what they have to do exactly and often just plain give up. All the ARR system of questing does is cut out this middleman and tell you what you need to do simply. If it's that much of an issue, turn off the Duty List and quest notifications in the Config.