What Engine Does Baldur's Gate 3 Run On?

The Baldurs Gate 3 engine is the Divinity Engine, Larian Studios' own in-house engine — not Unreal, not a licensed third-party tool.

Where it came from

Larian built the engine for their earlier RPGs, most directly Divinity: Original Sin 2. Baldurs Gate 3 reuses that foundation rather than starting over, which is part of why the two games share a similar feel in combat and interaction systems despite being different settings.

What changed for this game

Larian extended it with new cinematic functionality specifically for Baldur's Gate 3 — the fully directed, voice-acted dialogue scenes with camera cuts and character close-ups that the earlier Divinity games did not attempt at this scale. That system is the visible difference between the two games even though the underlying engine is the same lineage.

Why it matters for performance and mods

Being an in-house engine rather than a licensed one is part of why official modding support took time to arrive after launch, and why third-party tools have less documentation to work from than a game built on Unreal or Unity would.

The short answer

One engine, one studio, refined across three major RPGs rather than swapped out between them.