Larian Studios Confirms Baldur’s Gate 3 Engine Reached Its Limits, Building a New One for Divinity
At The Game Awards 2025, among the many announcements of new games, Divinity, the new role-playing game from Larian Studios—the studio best known for Baldur’s Gate 3—was revealed.
The project is still in its early stages, and many details have yet to be finalized. However, one thing is certain: the Baldur’s Gate 3 engine is no longer suitable.
Swen Vincke Explains the Limitations
Swen Vincke, CEO and Creative Director at Larian Studios, explained in an interview with Restart.run that the team is developing a new game engine because the old one imposed several limits on both Divinity: Original Sin and Baldur’s Gate 3.
Vincke stated: “[With Baldur’s Gate 3], when we saw something wasn’t working, it took us a long time to be able to react to it,” Vincke explained. “Now we’re building a new engine that allows us to be more flexible in how we put our rulesets together. We’ll be able to do things faster; when we see something’s not working, we’ll be able to change things – hopefully, let’s find out?”
When asked about the new engine, Vincke continued: “We need to do different things, and new things! Some of these things weren’t possible in the previous one. For instance, with BG3, the city was split in two parts, that was because we didn’t have streaming in it and couldn’t fit it into memory. So there’s a bunch of constraints – and a lot of smoke and mirrors – in BG3, and thank God it worked, but there’s so many things we could do better with some better tech and so that tech is now coming into place.”
In other news, CD Projekt Red co-CEO Michał Nowakowski recently confirmed that The Witcher 4 is taking significant inspiration from Baldur’s Gate 3 to drive innovation in the RPG genre.
