In Morrowind in New Vegas, though, you could wander into dangerous areas pretty easily, especially when you weren't capable of surviving a battle with anything there.
With New Vegas, you could just walk north from the starting town and meet a deathclaw, and Boom! Dead! Your weapons have no effect, and the thing does an alien pounce attack and instakills you. You know you went the wrong way, the townspeople told you not to go that way because of the deathclaws, and you realize that this game is different right away.
With Morrowind, you can go places with just animals, not even monsters, that are fast enough and strong enough to catch you and kill you early on, and it's down to you not being tough enough, fast enough, and strong enough to outrun them, survive their attacks, or outfight them yet. The only way to beat them is to get them stuck on an obstacle and plink them to death (and that doesn't even work in New Vegas because of the damage resistance - your puny weapons in the beginning won't even scratch a deathclaw).
Another example is Gothic II. That one didn't have level scaling at all. If you went somewhere, you would always know what to expect if you'd been there before. It was terribly easy to run into something that you couldn't handle, and it wasn't a matter of "This game sucks, I can't kill everything easily, damnit," it's more "I have to kill weaker stuff to get stronger, get experience, and get money and get better equipment, before I can handle the tougher stuff." Although, this was one which had grinding, because, if you just played through for the quests... At no point was I ever able to successfully fight an orc and win, which caused me to restart the game once to play it again and try to get more XP that time, and then to quit it the second time when I still couldn't beat orcs when I got to the point in the main quest where I was sent to an orc-filled area, and there was no way to survive it (or to run through).
I ended up figuring that in order to survive it I probably would have had to kill every enemy in the entire available area twice (which is possible, you just have to know they're all going to respawn when you turn in one particular quest, and then kill them all again before going to the place with the orcs... That didn't seem like a fun plan, so I didn't restart again).