This is the real decision in budget soulslikes, and most buying advice gets it wrong by arguing about which game is better. They are both superb. What separates them for a buyer is much more concrete: one box has both of its expansions inside it and the other does not, and one of them lets you walk away from a fight you cannot win while the other does not.
Dark Souls III's budget disc is The Fire Fades Edition, which Bandai Namco bundles with both expansions — Ashes of Ariandel and The Ringed City — so there is nothing left to buy. Elden Ring is base game only at this price, and its expansion costs more than the disc does. Elden Ring is also the more expensive of the two and the one we still recommend first to most people who have never finished a game in this genre. Both of those things are true at once, and the rest of this page explains why.
The quick-pick cards above carry the live, date-stamped price for each. Below is the head-to-head on the things that actually decide the purchase, then a straight verdict. For the wider list, see best cheap soulslike games, where both of these finish in the top two.
The head-to-head
What is actually in the box
This is the biggest gap between them, and it is the one a store page is worst at explaining. The cheap Dark Souls III disc is The Fire Fades Edition, described by Bandai Namco as the complete experience: the game plus Ashes of Ariandel and The Ringed City. Those two expansions contain some of the best content FromSoftware has ever made, and at this price they are free.
Elden Ring's budget disc is the base game. Shadow of the Erdtree is a separate purchase at full expansion price — more than the disc itself costs — so the honest budget buy here is base game only. That is a completely fine purchase, because the base game is enormous. But it does mean that on a pure contents-per-dollar basis, Dark Souls III wins this comparison outright, and it is not close. We rank boxes on exactly that basis in best cheap game collections.
Structure: what happens when you get stuck
Now the other side of the argument. Both games are hard, and difficulty is not really what stops people — being blocked is. In Dark Souls III, when a boss stops you, your options are to get better at that boss, grind for levels in the area behind you, or summon help. The game is a sequence of areas you clear in order, so there is no third direction to walk.
Elden Ring's open world changes that completely. When something kills you four times, you ride somewhere else, get stronger on content you can handle, and come back a different character. That one structural decision is why Elden Ring broke this genre out to a mainstream audience, and it is why we recommend it first to newcomers despite the higher price and the missing expansion. If you have never finished a game like this, the cheaper box is the one more likely to end up unplayed — and an abandoned game has terrible value per dollar no matter what it cost.
Speed and feel
Dark Souls III is the faster, tighter game. Its combat is the quickest and most responsive FromSoftware had made up to that point, animations are shorter, and the whole thing feels like it was designed by people who had been making these for a decade and wanted to make one that moved. Elden Ring is slower and heavier in the hand, with more spectacle, more build variety, mounted combat and a far wider range of weapons and spells to make work.
Which one you prefer is taste, not quality. If you want a focused, propulsive action game that respects your evening, that is Dark Souls III. If you want a world to disappear into for a hundred hours, that is Elden Ring. The same split, one genre over, is in best cheap RPGs.
Length, and whether that is a good thing
Elden Ring is several times the size of Dark Souls III, and on this site that is normally decisive — more game per dollar is the whole metric. Here it is genuinely not, for two reasons. First, Dark Souls III plus both expansions is still a long game by any normal standard. Second, length only counts if you finish it: an open world you bounce off at hour twenty is worth less than a focused game you complete.
So treat the size difference as a preference rather than a scoreboard. Buy the big one if a hundred-hour game sounds like a holiday; buy the tight one if it sounds like homework.
Online, and what it costs you
PlayStation lists both games for up to 6 online players with PS Plus, and lists online play as optional on both. That matters twice over. It means you can summon another player to help with a boss in either game — the genre's oldest safety valve, and the single most effective way to get past a wall. And it means the subscription is a running cost on top of the disc, which our is PS Plus worth it breakdown prices out.
Both campaigns are complete offline, which is the important half. You own the single-player game permanently; the co-op is a service that could end one day, as it already has for older games in this family. Buy either of these for the campaign and treat summoning as a bonus.
Hardware and the free upgrade
Both picks here are PS4 discs that play on a PS5, and Elden Ring has one genuine advantage: PlayStation states that buyers of the PS4 version can upgrade to the PS5 version for free, so the cheap last-gen disc becomes the current-gen game. The catch is spelled out on the same page — a disc copy cannot be upgraded on a PS5 Digital Edition, because there is no drive to verify it with. On a drive-less console both of these discs are off the table and the honest route is digital; see physical vs digital PS5 games.
Ratings
Both are rated M for Mature 17+ by the ESRB — Elden Ring for Blood and Gore, Language, Suggestive Themes and Violence. Neither is a gift for a younger player, and if that is what you are shopping for, start from cheap games for kids instead.
The verdict: which should you buy?
Buy Dark Souls III: The Fire Fades Edition if you have finished a game like this before, or if contents-per-dollar is how you decide. It is the cheaper box, it includes both expansions, it is the fastest and most focused game in the series, and nothing on this page gives you more finished content for less money.
Buy Elden Ringif this is your first one. You will pay more for less included content, and you will be far more likely to actually finish it, because its open world means a boss that stops you is never a dead end. That is worth paying for exactly once — and once you have finished it, the Fire Fades box is the obvious next purchase, with both expansions waiting in it.
Either way, both are in the top two of best cheap soulslike games, and both are on the shelf covered by best PlayStation games under $30.
