I asked that question a long time ago, and still have no answer. Possibly the team at Larian doesn't know either. Mulitplayer in LAN and over IP should be possible, but I have no idea regarding global chat, global community, joining 'random' people.
And then there's the announcdement of gog galaxy, which could make all features that exist in Steam available on gog as well, but there's no info on that either. If Larian doesn't know yet, the least they could do is publicly state so .. better than leaving us in the dark and ignoring our questions.
