edit: I just attempted this again on my laptop, they have slightly fixed the issue. If an update is queued when you're online you can remove it from the queue and then go offline and you can play it again. However if you are online you still need to update in order to play the game. This is much better than what it used to be, which was if it detected that you need an update even if you canceled the update and went offline it would say update required.

old post: If you could point me to these settings that you indicate it would be much appreciated,

Please be aware that if the setting your indicating is the allow background updates or the prevent auto updates. While that will make it so the game will not update automatically it will still register the game as requiring update which means if you go offline it won't let you play the game until the update has been done.

I'm going to go test it again because it's been a while since I've tried update in a few minutes