You are correct. I own the game on humble and while you can play it offline, you have to login with your account data from the dev site to access leaderboards which are hosted on their servers.

Edit: Note to myself - read threads until the end before posting ... toxicTom already confirmed it so ...

From what I remember, the devs pulled a BS worse than NMS, in which a bunch of quests, another kind of value and something else was locked behind online: to put it short, the game let you made offline and online characters, much similar to diablo II back in the day, and only the online characters were able to acces all said content. This generated a shitstorm so big from both steam and GOG users that devs were forced to make these features available in offline mode as well.

Now I don't know if your question was referring to this, as from what I recall, this was the only issue, which was also fixed to boot (unless I'm missing something here).

clarry's question relates to the following sentence, which can currently be found on Van Helsing's GOG game page:
"A free Neocore account is required to access Online Multiplayer and other online features" (emphasis mine).

It's a bonus, really.

I think you mean Diablo 1 because Diablo 2 had all of their quests the same as offline as online. Diablo 1 had quests that were different between online and offline.

No, what I meant was that, IIRC, characters were separated between offline and online in order to avoid cheating.

I could be wrong and thought about the wrong game, but for some reason diablo II is coming to mind.

Yeah Diablo 2 has Battle.net realms and the characters there are stored server side, and cannot be used locally afaik. But you can use local characters in direct tcp/ip multiplayer outside of battle.net. As far as I know, none of the in-game content is exclusive to battle.net multiplayer (although there are drops and sets so rare that your chances of completing them without trading with other players is really quite ridiculously low).

My guess is 2.

Someone finally noticed that we are discontent with the DRM in NMS - and that some customers even stopped buying GOG games because of it. Only then someone at GOG decided that it might make sense to contact Hello Games about the issue. Before that, they probably didn't care and just slapped the disclaimer on.

Yeah you are correct in that regard that both offline and online characters are separate to avoid cheating,.

Let's hope that Hello Games will be willing to fix the issue and remove the 'one time online' requirement.

I am curious how much playing offline affects it. then if someone happened to jump back to online. I was really into NMS about a year back, but moved and the net took forever to connect to the new place. I was somewhat scared to play it offline, then re-connect to online and possibly lose stuff. Like how they update the universe every so often. Would my planet/base even get saved. Many ifs and buts. I never seem to get any clear answers online about it either. Just people saying "you can play it offline". But not adding in how much I couldn't do offline.

In the end, I just stuffed it and didn't play it. Went onto other games and have never really gone back. The only reason I brought it on GOG was for it being DRM free. Seems that hasn't been the case for awhile. The amount of single player games that refuse to even load, when I had no net was high. Scary high really. From other game launchers.

Now while I can indeed run NMS offline. The point GOG allows this game on their store front. Will other games in the future be allowed here that always need to be played online, clearly not multiplayers within this. Which is the real concern.

Sorry for necro'ing the thread.
Just wanted to inform that NMS offline installers received a new update (details below):
https://www.nomanssky.com/2020/10/halloween-update/

Apparently there's now a chance to obtain Quicksilver from certain missions.
Since I've never played the game I don't know if this changes anything concerning the "online activation" issue or if the problem remains the same.

If anyone has an offline install of the game and wants to try it, please do so.
Thank you.

Necro'ing a thread when the last reply was three days ago? Lol :)

But getting QuickSilver is only one problem, spending it is another. The items are locked behind an online component, effectively DRM. The only workaround is to connect to HG servers or to edit your save file, like applying a crack to the game you bought.

Thanks. I was assuming that the issue was mostly Quicksilver only spawning on online missions, thus preventing the acquisition of items on offline play. Then the problem remains, it seems.