Well that doesn't seem weird to me. I mean people say environment art is repeditive but not characters? Constantly making the same special forces guy every game? Making 20 human heads for the background characters? That gets old too...
while I am not a character artist, I somewhat doubt that you put "life / emotion" into every character, there surely are NPCs / enemys which simply have to be done for the sake of it. Just thinking of the countless soldiers that are dying in most games. They can be compared to the general buildings/scenery you walk by…
It is hard to think modular, if you have ever had to make tiling textures or worked on old 8bit games, than I think it might come a bit more naturally for those people. I've been doing it for a while with mostly organic tunnels and organic outdoor enviroments. Its nice to work this way in max and use XRefs. You can then…