This game looks interesting to me, but I've generally found the 'go anywhere, do anything' style of game to be more interesting in execution for a few reasons. For instance, with Daggerfall, there are a ton of towns you can go to, but there's nothing unique about any of them, and you're doing pretty much the same, exact subset of random quests no matter where you go.

So I'm wondering--how is this game in terms of providing the player with stuff to do? Are there things outside of just endlessly-repeating random quests? Are there unique places and towns, or do they all tend to be cardboard cutouts of eachother? Also, how dynamic is the world? Does stuff ever happen outside of what the player is directly causing?

It is very much at Daggerfall's level of copy-pasting, not Morrowind's of Fallout's. The number of unique places is small, and I get the definite feeling more random events were planned than made it. But in other ways it is the polar opposite of Daggerfall.

Quests in Daggerfall were meh, the overworld was pointless. There was really nothing worthwhile but those big dungeons. Problem is, a glitch makes exploring them for more than a short time very problematic. As a result I never got far, finding the game pointless not long after the starting dungeon.

The dungeons of Darklands are sparse and mostly disappointing. But the way things are written and the options presented are very immersing. Wandering the world map and dealing with random events is actually fun. It feels like a game designed to be a non-linear RPG from the ground up, instead of non-linearity tacked into a dungeon crawler or jrpg.

Whether I'd recommend Darklands to you depends on whether being well written/designed can make up for repetition and copy-paste.

-edit add-
"Does stuff ever happen outside of what the player is directly causing?"
Yes, but nothing that significantly alters the game world. Some problems/quests appear and disappear over time, even if you don't solve them. Others, including the main quest, won't go away until you deal with them. Hamlets can even be destroyed without you being involved in any way, though cities cannot.

I'd like to add to Sfon's answer that cities, while not very unique and they may even look the same, are NOT carbon copies of each other - they differ in many small aspects. Some have exceptional blacksmiths/armorers/bowyers/artisans, a few have universities, and what saints you can study about in a city's monastery (each can teach you about four) and what goods you can buy in a certain type of shop in any city are randomly generated at the start of the game. For example, so far I've only found Maganeses (an important but rare alchemical component) in two towns, and thus I'm keeping going back to Duisberg (one of the towns where the foreign traders sell Maganeses) to resupply my alchemist.

Darklands has been a major inspiration for Daggerfall so it's no surprise to see a similarity.

Darklands was designed to be shipped on diskettes so that puts some hard limits on how much you can include. As a result artwork is sometimes reused for different situations to save disk space.

Hamlets can be destroyed by dragons. You can stop this if you feel like it. There are various ways of dealing with dragons. Dragons are after all intelligent beings and can be reasoned with if you so desire.

I am a masive fan of Daggerfall. I came to it late and had to scavange the hardware to put together an 'old-school' P166 to play it(it doesn't always like DOSBox and modern PC hardware). Then i moved onto Morrowind and ended up running about 200 mods ontop of the base game(a Massively Modded Morrowind as i call it).

Darklands IS quite different from Daggerfall in many ways(it's game world is much smaller, it's not from an FPS viewpoint, it's party based not solo based etc), but it does have an aspect of Daggerfalls 'things look much the same'. The differences are in the small details, like one town in Darklands(and only one) might have a high quality Blacksmith, the best in medieval germany, or there may only be a few towns where you will find a University and a Cathedral in the same place etc.

But i agree with Sfon that Darklands doesn't feel quite as 'sterile' as Daggerfall, the world seems more alive and hunting far and wide for the best equipement means you will end up travelling around a lot, which means you'll also run into more of the fun/interesting/dangerous random encounters and missions.

For the price, if you like quite old fashioned looking hardcore crpg's, you can't go wrong with Darklands imho.

The quality of each town's blacksmiths and other guilds and also where you can find a cathedral or university is pre-set - you can look it up in the cluebook. What they sell, however, IS randomly decided at the start of the game, so you indeed may have to hunt for the best equipment.
(Or did you know that? From reading your post, I got the feeling you thought even these were random.)