Why such dull cutscenes?
I’m not a fan of the way they did dialogue or story cut-scenes in this game either to be certain. In all fairness though, an MMO can’t easily have cut-scenes like the ones you posted above. Those games have one character mesh and voice actor to build around, allowing much more flexibility in the creation of those scenes.
This MMO has 5 races, most with significant sexual dimorphism between genders. Additionally each model can be customized and resized. Each race and gender has a different voice actor. I feel with these issues on the minds of the developers, they elected to take a cheaper and easier method of storytelling. Unfortunately that philosophy appears to bleed through into many other aspects of the personal story.