I was wanting to purchase Shadow Awakening but have heard it requires an "always on" internet connection to play. Do you need to activate it?
if so, must you have a connection thereafter like "Uplay" and others of that ilk. if so, forget it! I will not purchase DRM games on GOG!

It does work without an internet connection although it throws up an error window at every launch when blocked. However, the game loads in the background and can be accessed by clicking on its minimised window. Not a perfect scenario but at least the game does work without a connection. Hope this helps.

so I guess just an activation then you are good to go. I am guessing the error message it is the windows firewall wanting to "connect" such and such .exe file and let it through. that happens in most games.
thanks.

No, no activation required at all - I've never allowed the game through my firewall and it runs fine. The error message is not the firewall, it is from the game itself which throws a hissy fit if it can't connect (see attached picture). Once it's done that, the game will load fine.

I experienced exactly what Pajama described.

My firewall was asking me about the connection attempts and even before I click no, that game-crashed dialog popped up. The game seemed to be running fine in the background, but I clicked the the "OK" button there and the game exited. I've seen this in other games too.

That was good enough for me, but I played around with it a bit more for the sake of this post and stumbled into something that might interest a handful of people: the game honors the HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY environmental variables. And if I block its connection attempts to those, it never gives that crash pop-up and doesn't create the debug logs. It runs cleanly.

It never attempts a DNS connection and it tries to connect to TCP port 443 on 35.241.52.229 and 35.241.26.53 - both are which seem to be Google owned at the moment. I guess it's trying to notify Google Analytics.