Multiplayer

In my experience, multiplayer generates a new animal population for that session. It does not seem to draw from your solo map, or have any impacts to time or animals when you go back to solo. I have heard some folks use it to blast for cash. I use it for some testing, when I don’t want to age my map.
Multiplayer offers players a bit of freedom from worrying about managing animals and large amounts of time commitments to specific animals. With some luck you can find great trophies in multiplayer, and LiquidFire has referred to it as a sort of Classic 2.0 which I take to mean that it has better hunting and graphics, and each time you play you have no idea what you might find. The biggest drawback at this point is that the trophies are not as spectacular as Classis offers.

In my experiences in playing multiplayer, both solo and with others, I have noticed a few things that seem to hold true for me. I will share that on the broad scope instead of giving away specifics. I personally do not feel that multiplayer devalues the game. Yes, with a lot of luck, you can get as great of a trophy as the game offers quickly, just like was the case in Classic. However, you likely have no clue how old that animal is, and if they have years left to get bigger. You will also likely shoot a number of 99% plus animals in the first couple years of their mature phase, that could have scored really really high scores. Also, in order to get trophies of multiple species or a species that you really want, the challenges of multiplayer can take a very long time. So, like all the topics in this collection, it is offering another of many tools to figure out how you want to play.

It seems to me that each herd has ranges for the animals that the herd can spawn. This seems to be true for both age and fitness. I have found some herds that seem to almost always only spawn young and adult males. I never seem to see any matures in those herds. The exact mix of how many youngs and how many are adults varies from session to session, but it seems like they never get matures. Other herds seem to almost always have matures. So for age, it seems to me, that when that herd spawns for a session, it has XX% for an animal to be a young, a YY% chance to be adult, and ZZ% chance to be a mature. And each herd seems to have different X, Y and Z percentages. To further complicate this, there seems to be more than one percentage for age within an age phase to account for new matures or old matures, since animals for a herds spawn can range for each age phase. Sometimes the matures are very fresh looking so they have several years to age left. Others are very worn and gray, so are in or near the last year of life. It is hard to test, but it has been holding true from what I have been able to see.

The fitness seems to hold true in a similar way. Some herds seem to always have mid and low high fitness animals when that herd spawns. Others seem to have a better chance to get the high fitness animals in them. So when you combine these mechanics for age and fitness, yes you can get lucky and get a combo of the right age and fitness for a trophy in a single spawn of a multiplay session, just like you can in an initial spawn for a solo campaign. On the other hand, you may check that herd, and have a very high fitness animal that is young, and never pay attention to him again before he despawns at the end of the session. With the size of the maps, the number of herds on each map, the ranges for ages and fitness, I think do offer this as a reasonable option to play this way for that fresh experience each time you play, without making it a cheese method that some folks claim. Yes you can get a few trophies super fast.

Yes you may figure out the herds that offer you the best chance for the right combo of age and fitness, but even that herd will not provide a trophy each session. I do not think that this method will be anything close to quick to cover even all the deer species, much less every species in the game. And you have no chance of steady progress, you are rolling the dice each time. With solo maps, you do have options available to pretty much guarantee eventual success if you stick with it. Multiplayer does not offer that. Also if you want to ensure that your trophies reach max potential, solo maps offer you tools to achieve that. Multiplayer does not really do that either.