Can I play Assassin's Creed 2 or use Ubisoft's Uplay offline?

Late last night (around midnight EDT), I tried to play Assassin's Creed 2 on the PC via Steam. I was unable to even get past the Uplay login screen because Ubisoft's service was down. Not only that but their entire website was down including support. Service was restored eventually, and things looked okay this morning.

I was under the impression that Ubisoft removed the DRM from the PC version so that an "always-on" connection was not necessary to play the game. I'm lucky enough to have good Internet service that has rarely ever gone down. Obviously the problem was on Ubisoft's side of things.

However, these events have me questioning whether I still need an Internet connection to use the Uplay service and launch Assassin's Creed 2. Is there a workaround for this or an offline mode that I could use? I did not notice any settings that I could change in Ubisoft's launcher.

Ubisoft never removed the DRM, they just made it less harsh if you get disconnected. It's still just as harsh on not being able to play while not connected.

All the updated did was basically, instead of quitting the game when you get disconnected, forcing you to restart from last checkpoint, it now pauses the game until you get connection back, which means you restart from the exact same point. If you quit instead of waiting to reconnect however, then you must restart from the previous checkpoint as before.