Copypasta of my review from a friends forums
I can honestly say this game has the definite possibility of being a WoW killer. More than AOC.
Age Of Conan was a great concept. The game was also half finished. Patches went completely backwards. Stats didn't work at all. So, everyone left.
Fast forward now, everyone's a bit more cautious calling games "WoW Killers" after AOC flopped, even me. I then heard about warhammer Online preview weekend. Being the guinea pig for my friends, I preordered and got the preview weekend chance, and I played WAR I did.
I didn't sleep until sunday I played so much. The game really is WoW 2.0, but class balance is MUCH better.
I didn't do much PVE, other than a unique system of question called public quests. In these, you participate in a quest thats, you guess it, is public. You usually have 3 stages, ever increasing in difficulty. Once you finsih the last stage, loot is rolled on automatically by anyone who participated, plus the game adds +10-400 roll points based on your help on said quest. The system needs tweaking, as people who walk by and fight the end mob DO sometimes end up beating first place contributers in rolling.
I spent most of the weekend doing what I enjoy most, flattening people's faces in. It seems like oneshotting in this game is nigh impossible, and its just a giant game of chess. It didn't feel like wow, where you can take any class with X gear. Now granted, we're talking level 11 here out of 40. By far not the BEST example. PvP overall is a blast. I can confirm out of my skills in previous MMO's that this game's pvp is by far more skilled than WoW. Hands down. This game even does Battlegrounds; but it's called "Scenarios". Good thing too, because comparing the fun between the two is apples and oranges.
You can also level pvping in this game, as scenarios give you a HEALTHY amount of cash per kill. There were gear issues, as currently in the preview a certain tier of armor for pvp is so good that you can wear it 2 levels before you move out of a level bracket for pvp, making you omgjesus for 4-5 rounds before you leveled out of it. I think its def. getting fixed, though. This, and pet pathing were the ONLY two huge prominent issues I had. I had very little crash to desktops, but for the people that did have them, apparently they've found it and are working diligently on the issue.
I ended up playing in a 30v30 battle, and we had LITTLE lag. The servers handled the load of preview weekend BEAUTIFULLY. The true test will be open beta, though. I did try a siege on a keep, and the idea itself is a lot cleaner and efficient than AOC's system. You can buy siege weapons, and ammo. then, you can build them on pads around a keep. From there, you can make battering rams, oil siege weapons, towers, you name it. We ended up sieging a level 20 keep at level 12-14 and almost won if it wasnt for the Order wiping us on the boss. Sieges kept me up 24 hours and I only logged after we had all the keeps and we had patrolled for an hour around.
The only thing that irked me was the graphics. The graphics were obviously turned WAAAAAY the fck down to make sure people could play this game, because graphics usually cause more problems to low end-mainstream users than its worth for the high-end enthusiast users. This really, really irked me. Even set on high, the ground textures don't load until your very close, and in general it only looks SLIGHTLY better, in some cases worse than wow. The atmosphere ingame is a lot more mature in my opinion than wow though. More "evil" going on I guess. One of the first quests I did involved throwing poo at a dwarven tower. Another involved getting an ogre drunk to "smash them stunties with me spikey ball".
Overall, I'm thoroughly happy I decided to preorder the game. I wanted a game where pve wasnt the bread and butter like every mmo, and luckily enough, I found it. I leveled mostly by pvp means, with the exception of public quests, and I leveled fast, so its good to know there isn't any bias between pve/pvp either. This game truely has the potential to beat wow, it just needs 1-3 months to build up a playerbase and the game itself. Lets just hope they don't pull an AOC on us Sad