The West Marches ( http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/ ) were a seminal early OSR hexcrawl sandbox. They had one city and sprawling wilds. The wilds did not have agents (as in, stuff happened in them only when PCs were around), nor there was an overall plot. It was a exploration/survival/adventure kind of game, and this was by design.

Hexcrawl and pointcrawl are two terms that define spacial relationships between locations and how you move between them. The pointcrawl is similar to a hexcrawl, but instead of being a regular grid the connections between the locations are ad-hoc.

First link here explains it well: http://hillcantons.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/pointcrawl-series-index.html