Is OnlineSubsystem required for replication in Unreal?

You answered the original question so I marked that and created a secondary question

https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/what-might-prevent-a-client-from-properly-acknowledging-the-pawn-it-has-possessed/1665704

From my trading and debugging, I think I have narrowed the issue down to the “acknowledgement” process that happens after the objects are spawned on the client side.

There is a step where the client checks if the GetPawn == the Acknowedged Pawn in the Player Controller … if that doesn’t match it retries basically and that is what I am seeing

So sorting out why NewPawn for that method is not set/null

Haven’t figured that out yet having to poke at the dark with it but slowly crawling deeper into the rabbit hole