free-roaming

Adjective

free-roaming (comparative more free-roaming, superlative most free-roaming)

1. Allowing the player to move freely through a virtual world or choose the game narrative and objectives at will; an open world.
   • While Metroid introduced multiple endings to a linear game, other more recent designs have presented free-roaming worlds incorporating multiple gameplay paths.2009, Wendy Despain, Writing for Video Game Genres: From FPS to RPG, →ISBN, page 49
   • Let the player trigger these in any order she chooses; this is vital because the game ceases being static and takes on the illusion of a free-roaming game.2009, Michael Duggan, Wii Game Creation for Teens, →ISBN, page 294
2. Having the ability to move about unconstrained by reins, leashes, fences, cages, barns, and so on.
   • From the distance of today, my guess is that it was the free-roaming horses that had most to do with the increase in carnivores, mainly because nobody was trying to protect them.2001, Chilco Choate, The Fire Still Burns, →ISBN, page 51
   • Further, the chickens are free-roaming, which means that it is necessary for the farmers to closely watch what the birds ingest.2004, Kosher Chicken from Canada, →ISBN, page 1-5
3. Not orbiting a gravitational center.
   • Microlensed double-image quasars have sent a consistent message that the baryonic dark matter consists of a dark population of free-roaming planet mass objects.2005, Neil J C Spooner, Vitaly Kudryavtsev, The Identification of Dark Matter, →ISBN, page 183
   • This would offer an explanation for some of the free-roaming planets that have been found and it could mean that more exist across the Milky Way.2012, David Braun, National Geographic Tales of the Weird, →ISBN