What game cannot be completed without DLC? oO And further more, what do you mean by complete?
Dungeon Defenders. Without the Series EV or the Summoner, completing all of the core content on all difficulty levels is actually impossible. Nightmare difficulty without SEV is neigh impossible because of Goblin Copters (the missile reflect wall nullifies them). Without the summoner you're just gimping yourself, because the summoner allows you to double your defense capabilities.
That's not the only game. But I'd be hard pressed to name one, largely because I never play them. Also unable to answer the second half of that for the same reason (that is, by not remembering what game it was, I can't specify what I mean exactly).
Also, why shouldnt a publisher have a say so in the games their funding?
Because publishers are complete dumbfucks. Developers want their funding sources to be hands off so that they can make the game they want to make without a dozen people Building By Committee it into a complete mess.
This is so untrue on so many levels...
Also, every developer that I've heard has spoken to that similar effect. Seems to hold true to any game maker, be it board games, card games or dem video games. There a whole wikia dedicated to left over content in games, that couldnt make the cut for various reasons.
There's a difference between "cutting a few features for budget (or other) reasons, but the game is otherwise finished" and "this game is blatantly obviously unfinished and incomplete."
Shadowrun Returns wanted to include a kind of multiplayer where you could hire a friend's characters as NPCs, but it was cut because no one could quite figure out how that would actually
work (one of the features was that if you got that NPC killed, you couldn't hire them again....but the game was client side single player with a save function: what happened if you loaded up the game prior to getting the NPC killed? Could you still hire them?)
The loss of that feature was lamented, but it was widely known that there were design issues with it, and rather than spending time and money figuring out how to make it work, it was scrapped. But the game, when released, shouldn't be any less "complete" without it.