about 350 hours

iv had so many playthroughs and so many 24hr gaming sessions iv lost count...well over 300

Those are some inspiring numbers! I have finished all DLC, quests, etc at about 180 hours. My question is how you go back in for another play through when you know where everything is and what is going to happen? Seems like spinning your wheels to me. Help me see the light!

You play a different way. If your first character was a goody-two-shoes who allied with the Brotherhood of Steel, wore Power Armor and used Small Guns, maybe you next play a Leather armor wearing Melee mercenary who will join with anyone as long as the caps keep flowing or an evil Explosives character who's mad at Dad and accepts Mr. Burke's offer and sides with Tenpenny. There's always something else to see, something you've overlooked somewhere, a line of dialogue you missed because you chose a different response the first time or you didn't have the right perk. Almost two years later I'm still finding new places to explore and I recently had a conversation I'd never heard before.

Mods on the PC...

Probably the biggest mod that helped with re-playability is the one that moves the bobbleheads around. Each of the 20-odd bobbleheads gets randomly moved a the start of the game to one of 5 spots. So now, even if you know where all the bobbleheads should be, there's only a 20% chance that you'll actually find them there. I wish someone would do similar for all the skill books, but that's about an order of magnitude more difficult.

Adding Marts Mutant Mod (MM) to the mix also helped for replay.

Turning the XP gain down to 50% of normal means that I need to explore more to level-up, because I can't just do a handful of a quests and get a big level bump.

I try to make each character have a different focus as well. One might be a sniper / sneaky. Another is a mid-range, combat-armor, small automatic weapons type. A third would be a big weapons / heavy armor type. Plus there's the choice of karma, whether you try to stay neutral, evil or good.

But mostly, on repeat playthroughs - I tend to avoid the main quest. Instead, I go exploring and see what I stumble into. The only things I make sure not to do is stumble across an area used in the main quest chains until I'm ready to go there. (Going early either short-cuts the quest chain, or can even break things due to how fragile some of the FO3 quests are.)

I'm level 11 or so on this latest character, and about 20 hours in on gameplay. I still haven't defused the Megaton bomb, and I still haven't gone to GNR or Rivet City. But at level 10-12 is like the sweet spot for me - I feel strong enough to take on most enemies, I have enough ammo to do it, but everything is still a challenge. So this is where I back off the XP gain (with the choose_XP mod) and simply enjoy exploration and doing odd quests. I may even go from 50% XP gain down to 25% or 33% if I feel like I'm leveling up too fast still.

THOUSANDS

All through 8th-9th grade

I always do only 1 maybe 2 playthroughs in videogames.
In my single and first playthrough,i just finished all of the addons and now still got a little exploring to do. I currently have 150 hrs,so still i may do an hour or two more.And i started the game more than a year ago!

200 hours.

Here's to 200 more. :foodndrink: