Wait, it's working now?
I mean I knew it was being worked on, but I thought release was going to be "someday".
Other than being more objective based and having proper NPC and faction interactions, is it still like DDA?
Randomly generated world, all features intact? Anything missing?
Depends on how you define "working"; and it's a brand new project that Whales is working on, which means that unless he recreates a feature from C:DDA it doesn't exist in Cata 2. Last I heard (which was about a month ago) the level was more that of a tech demo/extremely early alpha as opposed to an actual working game.
And I might as well drop the sort of standard dev response from C:DDA:
It's a completely new game, and one that we aren't interested in helping with (and it doesn't seem that Whales want's help either). If we're going to spend time working on a game it's going to be the one we've already invested in. We wish Whales the best, and from the sounds of it it will be different enough that you can play both, one being a "capture/defend the bases"-type island warfare and the other being an open-world survival simulation.
Personal opinions:
1) Even with the speed Whales is working at, IMO, it's going to be another month or two before he even hits the Cata 1 level of development, and with the speed C:DDA is developing at I'm not sure he will ever be able to "catch up" to it in terms of features (though he will certainly have an edge in some of the bigger ones due to not having to tear through all the old code).
2) I'm skeptical about following the game of someone who has already dropped a game because they didn't want to work on it anymore. I maintain high hopes, but I'm skeptical.
3) All that said I still look forward to playing it if/when it gets more complete! It definitely looks like a fun concept, and I hope that Whales does as great of a job at implementing it as he did with coming up with the concept in the first place.