Quote from Austinkun;936427:
They would have named it something other than Mabinogi #2 if it was going to be ultimately different. Perfect example: Mabinogi: Heroes.
Guild Wars 1 and 2 are very different games. They play differently. But what is for certain is 2 shares style, lore, and qualities of 1 that make it more of a successor in the series and not a new game from the company. The same can be said for Mabinogi.
If Mabinogi 2 was exactly like #1, no one would play it. They'd just stay with #1. In Mabi, we are all too attached to our characters to just leave and start all over for just a graphics update. It has been EIGHT years since Mabinogi launched in Korea. Plenty of things have changed as far as gaming and technology is concerned. I'm sure devCat is looking to make a game suitable for the current market, not the one from eight years ago.
Getting into semantics is silly. Fact of the matter is that Devcat have stated the game will be different from any other and that you've said that they will be similar (and then different later on).
Quote from Austinkun;936611:
Sure but that doesn't really make much sense considering they made a logo and a teaser site awhile back.
[Image: http://images.mmosite.com/feature/news/2008_05_08/mabinogi2/screenshot/mabinogi2_02.jpg]
It does when you consider that site existed since early days and only really exists to hire people (i.e. it's not really a teaser site). In fact that's basically what the large gold text below the logo says, "devcat studios are looking for people to work on Mabinogi II" (in a nutshell). This is ignoring that it's not as if companies haven't changed titles/logos prior to game publication.
EDIT: And because no one else seems to have posted them,
Mabinogi II character artwork presented at the 2011 Nexon Developer Conference. In order from top to bottom, "Mabinogi 2 concept art", Nuadha (yes, he looks nothing like the Nuadha we know), Morrighan, Cichol, Macha (without red hair in contrast to our lore), Neamhain and "Ehune" (I don't know what the approximate celtic spelling will be, a lot of the celtic names are rendered differently in Korean and don't always match up to their actual pronunciation).