Number of works of fiction that made me shed at least one tear: 3Thou seeketh soul power, dost thou not?TOX: 33524385841A92B08787EEBEBA2DB51ED293C4F15A2E292F3F C92165E82388281433A77EA8FE
“For God will not permit that we shall know what is to come... those who by some sorcery or by some dream might come to pierce the veil that lies so darkly over all that is before them may serve by just that vision to cause that God should wrench the world from its heading and set it upon another course altogether and then where stands the sorcerer? Where the dreamer and his dream?”
The same could be said about any game. It's not like modern warfare is above the trend of "repetition and time-wasting". There's only so many different situations you can go through before you start seeing similar results on the same map that you've played 50 times before.
“For God will not permit that we shall know what is to come... those who by some sorcery or by some dream might come to pierce the veil that lies so darkly over all that is before them may serve by just that vision to cause that God should wrench the world from its heading and set it upon another course altogether and then where stands the sorcerer? Where the dreamer and his dream?”
That's what mods are for. If you didn't get the PC version, you got the wrong version. Bethesda published games are perhaps some of the most mod-friendly out there, next to maybe the Bioware Neverwinter Nights. I thought pretty similar to the way you did, until the DLC started to come out, and I stumbled on the better mod communities. That effectively quintupled the amount of playtime I had on FO3. You never even had to hunt for mods that didn't break the game, both kinds were very plentiful, and the community generally trended toward keeping everything in touch with the lore (atmosphere, aesthetic style, etc).
You might download a new weapon or clothes/armor, but a good 90% of the time, you still had to find it. A lot of the modders were very clever about where they hid things, so often you would end up going to an area you had never even knew was there. It took me about 7 playthroughs to even find all major locations on the map (I still didn't take the Explorer perk until a playthrough much later than that). Sure, I repeated a good percentage of the material, but it didn't matter because you felt like a Wanderer, and doing things in a different order helped a lot.
Fallout 3 really let you fool around. It was up to you to make each time more interesting. Sticking to a different weapon, mixing up your skills to force you to play a different way, making up your own story to detail your particular motivations. Mods only made that easier (like try playing an unarmored martial artist with only spiked knuckles, or make a ninja who only used silenced weapons).
So I'm really looking forward to New Vegas. I'll likely play through it on Hardcore Vanilla the first time through, then start looking for mods to fuel my subsequent playthroughs. Too bad I'll be on a business trip on release day.