Divinity Engine

Larian began development of Divinity Engine 1 for its game Divinity: Original Sin on a budget of only a few million dollars.^[1] Larian included a copy of the Divinity 1.0 Engine with Divinity: Original Sin for some Kickstarter backers, allowing them to make custom mods.^[1] To showcase the abilities of the engine, Larian included a "cow simulator" game made with the Divinity Engine Toolkit in its early access release.^[3][4]

Divinity Engine 2 was developed for Divinity: Original Sin II.^[5] Divinity Engine 2, along with all the in-house tools Larian developed such as for making levels, was included in the game files as "DivinityEngine2.exe".^[5][6] It had a focus of improving existing tools from Divinity Engine 1 as well as creating new tools and improving documentation.^[5] The engine has also been referred to as "Divinity Engine 3.0."^[7]

Divinity Engine 4.0 was developed for Baldur's Gate 3.^[2][8] A major focus for the new iteration was better support for cinematics.^[9] It included a Vulkan backend which was used as an option in Baldur's Gate 3 alongside the DirectX 11 backend.^[10][2] The modding tools initially included with Baldur's Gate 3 were not as extensive as those included in previous Larian games.^[11] In September 2024, an update for Baldur's Gate 3 was shipped that included essentially a modified version of Divinity Engine 4.0 but with many of the features disabled by default, including the level editor, although there are mods that can enable it.^[12] Larian developers attributed part of the game's success with their continued use of Divinity Engine as opposed to using a commercial engine such as Unreal Engine, having used and worked on the engine since 2010 while with commercial engines "the engine's roadmap is not necessarily your roadmap".^[13]