I've never been a big MMO player, but Guild Wars has always been an exception. It's focus on story driven play made it feel more like a co-op adventure than a true MMO. It is no surprise that its sequel, Guild Wars 2, is taking a similar approach to story telling. On the Guild Wars 2 development blog, motion capture director Chuck Jackman discusses how they plan to tell the story in the upcoming MMO.
Jackman describes the way that the story is told as a "three tiered system." The first tier is cinemas. The second is the core of the story and take place in game. The third tier are the ambient conversations you tend The reason they call the simple act of conversing with NPCs "cinematic" is because they created a whole new way of presenting their story within the context of their game. The motion capture team used all human resources available to them it seems, as Jackman states that the programmers, artists, writers and designers to create a system that resembles appearance of the conversations of The Witcher or Dragon Age, without the choices. It looks like a good way to tell a story, as can be seen in the video below. The actual character movements look very lively, and actually resemble some of the excellent motion capture work seen in games like Uncharted.
http://www.youtube.com/v/qjVu961oiKY?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0
The rest of the blog is interesting. It provides a very interesting look at some of the things we as games seem to take for granted a lot of the time, specifically how the writers of the series are dealing with things like matching the lip syncing. If nothing else, it makes for some good, lazy Sunday reading.