Where to Start with FromSoftware: Elden Ring or Dark Souls III?

For most newcomers, start with Elden Ring. Counterintuitively, the biggest and most punishing-looking of the two is the friendlier one to learn on, because its open world always gives you somewhere else to go when a wall proves too hard. If you prefer a focused, curated march and you already suspect you like this kind of game, Dark Souls III is the leaner, more traditional pick.

Elden Ring is the rare game where scale amplifies the vision instead of watering it down. The core loop, spotting something strange on a far ridge and going to poke it with a sword, is magnetic, and when a boss is beating you, you can simply leave, grow stronger elsewhere, and come back. That release valve is exactly what makes it forgiving for a first-timer, even though it is enormous and often brutal. Its only real flaws are some recycled dungeons late on, a small price for that much freedom.

Dark Souls III is the most consistent game in its series and, by design, the least surprising. It refines nearly everything FromSoftware had learned into one confident, relentless statement, and it almost never fumbles. It is more linear than Elden Ring, a curated gauntlet rather than an open country, which some players much prefer: no distractions, no wasted motion, just the next hard door. If Elden Ring's scale sounds exhausting, this is the more focused way in.

Neither is easy, but Elden Ring is the more beginner-tolerant precisely because it lets you route around a difficulty spike. Dark Souls III points you down a corridor and expects you to master it, so, paradoxically, the smaller game can feel harder for a newcomer, because you cannot grind your way past a wall somewhere else. Both reward patience, learning enemy patterns, and a willingness to die a lot.

If this is your first FromSoftware game, buy Elden Ring: its freedom is the best set of training wheels the genre has ever produced, and it is a masterpiece besides. If you want the purest, most focused version of the formula, or you have bounced off open worlds before, Dark Souls III is the tighter, cheaper, still-brilliant classic. Play one, and if it clicks, you will end up playing them all.