Sounds like you would love the Dark Souls games. They're Elden Ring without open world, and all legacy dungeons.
But elden ring’s design philosophy seemed to start with “what if we did dark souls but all doors and passages were open from the start?”
The answer is unsurprisingly that many players track awkward paths of hitting things too soon and too late.
If you’re going to have such significant character progression, linear games just make more sense. Breath of the wild gets away from it because link barely gets any stronger over the course of the game. Just a bit tankier.
Fighting bosses in elden ring and finding they’re drastically undertuned really ruins the point of playing a soulslike…
I prefer feeling confident that I’m at a good state to fight something and if I’m losing it’s just a skill issue to practice.
Farming in all souls games doesn’t actually net you that much, but it still feels like the easiest path forward at times. Elden ring is particularly weird with its scaling. Vigor gives much larger buffs to hp than people expect. Damage stats do much less.
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. That leveling system meant you never ran into anything beyond your level. But it also mean that in the late game you were constantly hounded by insanely powerful creatures randomly out on the road.
Unfortunately, mods that de-leveled the open world were not very good. You had no idea if you were walking into an area you outleveled, or were outleveled by, and many early quests took you to incredibly high-level areas.
I don't think the solution is just to rip them out and then proceed forward. And there are still other bad designs, of course; a sibling comment cites Oblivion. (Although I would call that an example of one of the "gyrations" I refer to; having a leveling system but then trying to remove it by somehow mathematically cancelling it is just weird. Quite distinct from not starting with one in the first place.)
I would cite something like Bayonetta as a good example of what I mean, though by no means the only possibility. Especially as "RPGs" continue to move more and more in the direction of straight-up-action-game combat anyhow. You open up some weapons. You can double your health and the other resource (forget what it's called), and I'm not even sure I love that, but you can. But fights are not about whether you're level 34 and they're level 63. Difficult fights are difficult because they are difficult.
In some sense the biggest mistake in my mind is that it gives designers such an easy answer; just slap a leveling system on it. More thought would be nice.
I could also cite something like Slay the Spire. No "levels" in sight, but your character certainly becomes more powerful over time, and your play gets better. Skill acquisition, clever combinations of abilities and features, etc. So much better than just a number that goes up.
Which certainly seems another step removed from logic.
The primary purpose of the leveling system in Borderlands, at least to my eyes, is to make it so you can't just pick up a gun on level one and use it the whole game, defeating the purpose of the main game loop to be forcing you to be constantly changing guns. OK, I get that purpose and in context it makes sense. But the leveling system is a really weird way to do it. I'd almost rather see guns decay instead. (Not do the whole "100% functional until they instantly and totally break"; we've got enough experiences with that to know how frustrating it is.) Decay is somewhat plausible though then you have to have the strength of will to reject repair mechanisms, which is still physically weird.
But I'm not really trying to propose all the solutions to all possible alternatives to leveling systems; I'm just saying "hey let's make the player and all the enemies 11% stronger every 30 minutes, except across a large set of dimensions impossible to ever keep scaled properly relative to each other in an exponential regime" is a silly thing.
I don't even like soulsborne games that much but I recognize the beauty and purity of the experience they provide. I'd rather be playing quake 3, but it's the same thing in a certain conceptual way.
Farming souls is stupid.
The game is also just unintuitive when it comes to defensive stats. Putting lots of points into endurance to wear the biggest armor is nothing compared to boosting vigor. Armor mostly sucks tbh.
There is a wide range of skill levels of players, and what is "appropriately leveled" for one player might be trivial or impossibly hard for others.
Players level to the point where they can beat the bosses that they get stuck on.
If you’re not good at the game, you can trivialize most encounters with the summons, or use multiplayer which adds a ton of luck to the outcome.
Actually farming runes is almost a trap for anything last stormveil.