In Guild Wars, our cinematics artists used a code-based macro language to take direct control of player characters and other models on the game server, moving them around in the actual game environment. While this system had some advantages—it utilized the character control and animation system, for example—it also had a number of drawbacks. To start, the process of creating cinematics was both time-consuming and technically difficult. The cinematic system itself was not amenable to tool-based automation. It was also easy to completely ruin a carefully planned cinematic shot with any subsequent edits to the environment.