I got down on the Alpha today and I have to say that I was impressed at how well the engine ran even though they stressed to the testers that it was not optimized and would run poorly. The dialogue system really impressed me and I hope they flesh it out a lot more. It was fun to type in "Who the fuck is Lord XXX" and have the NPC reply to me.
There's still a lot of work to be done but I feel much more confident that the game will be fun and stable upon release. Another thing to mention is that I didn't notice any of the traditional problems with big day 1 Alpha/Beta/Release such as timeouts, crashes, slow downloads, etc. I was very impressed at the stability of their back end. Then again that may be due to much less people hitting it than the other games.
If anyone isn't a backer and would like a video or some screens let me know and I'll post 'em. There's no NDA.