Living worlds seem to be one of the themes of this year’s E3, but Firefly is the only one working on a living world of goblins. The makers of the castle building sim Stronghold have turned their attention to the dungeons, trying to craft a living, breathing world where you don’t stumble across five harpies and a white wolf guarding a treasure chest.

The player takes control of a violent hero who has been tricked into serving one of the goblin factions in their war against the Red Eyes, a goblin tribe bent on the conquest of the other clans. While traveling through the goblin kingdom (both above and below ground) you will see how the whipping boys of midlevel D&D modules go about their days. There are goblin smiths and goblin pirates, goblin doctors and goblin generals – all trying to survive in a goblin world gone mad.

The developers are insistent on the player paying attention to this world. Instead of being informed about the world through cutscenes or expository dialogue trees, you will have to listen in on conversations going on around you. As the denizens of the dungeon jabber away, you will be given clues as to what is going on and why. They promise that you will never miss any plot central bits – if you don’t encounter or trigger really important conversations, then a story mechanism will alert you as to what is going on. But they don’t want this to be another action RPG.

Combat is intended to be tactical. Though you are a lone warrior, you will be expected to take on hordes of enemies, often coming through spawn points that you need to close. Some of the battles are like puzzles you will need to fight over and over again until you find the secret to wiping out the enemy force. The combat is almost entirely melee, with limited range options. You are a tank and a killing machine. The emphasis here is clearly on the action.

As the developer walks us through a scene of trench warfare, the attention to making the world populated is obvious. They promise a “dark” humor, and there are already some elements of that in place. Their living world is not, they confess, the living world of GTA; you cannot attack every civilian in the game, and there is a plot that you need to stick to. The goblins will supposedly need supplies to make weapons, and this is not the type of dungeon that has +2 swords in it.