I've preorder Warhammer and have played the beta a bit.

Based on my short experience with WAR, i will compare a few things:

World of Warcraft WAR

World Environment: 10 10(could be a little lighter though, everything is dark)

Character Models: 10 6

Enemy NPC models: 9 9

Learning Curve: 8 7

Player communication: 9 7

UI: 7 6

Character animations: 7 6

Enemy AI: 8 4

Why I rated the way i did.

World Environment: WoW and WAR both have beatiful worlds from what I can tell so far.

Character models: I don't like WARs character models, looks like any other generic MMO.

The enemies that you fight look pretty cool in WAR, however.

WoW is very noob friendly. War is slightly harder to understand what is going on, but they make up for it by making it virtually impossible to die in the beginning.

Communication was interesting in WAR. There don't seem to be general channels for every zone. So I was standing in front of one of the PQ hero mobs that would one shot me, and i couldn't ask anyone for help. /yell just does an emote, and won't yell what you type, there was no general channel, and even the person who was in my party didn't know how to talk to people in the area other than just saying it to those in the immediate viscinity.

UI: WoWs default UI is nothing innovative and neither is WARs. The only reason WAR loses a point here, is because the tooltips for the spells I had to click would cover up the number of Force that I had acquired, which was pretty annoying..

Character animations: The movement of the character have some flaws, such as clipping a

Enemy AI: The mobs that you face seem to have a lot of issues, at least at the low levels, which may just be bugs. Sometimes, if you are a ranged mob, you simply won't be able to cast at an enemy unless you walk into melee range. I assume it is because the mob has gotten stuck and is simply "evade bugging." Some enemies won't even aggro if you cast spells at them from far enough away, and you can just keep casting spells at them until they are dead.

Just some of my First thoughts after playing the beta for a short period, less than 3-4 hours total