@konana uhhhh, yes. Few of us started playing last week. After finishing the prologue and dumping into the Gate area there isn't a lot of direction. So after about two days of just grabbing suggested ARK missions we all started asking, wasn't there some big story to this game? So we go into the Story section and start clicking on the missions only to find they are not missions, they are cut scenes we never got when we were actually doing the missions they were associated with. So you are left completely disconnected from the story. It is no longer a story 'you' the character are a part of, it is a story you are watching after the fact happen. We all sat there for almost 2 hours watching cut scene after cut scene trying to piece together where all this stuff had happened, past tense, to us all.
Researching I discover that yes, they used to play for you out in the field as you were doing the missions so that you had some sense of context of what was going on. You were there, in the moment, when something happened and a cut scene occurs. Seems they have since removed that for whatever reason so that players are just expected I guess to go watch the anime to figure why they are even here.
It could very well be simply a difference in game design philosophies and so be it. That makes it no less jarring to some and in no way invalidates their opinions on the matter. FF14 also has the ability to watch the scenes later but does not remove them from the quests.