Why did Knights of the Old Republic II ship with cut content?

The timeline is the whole answer, and every part of it is on the record. LucasArts wanted a sequel to one of 2003's biggest games on a schedule BioWare, the original's developer, judged too tight; BioWare recommended Obsidian Entertainment, a new studio of Black Isle veterans, and Obsidian accepted a development window that Avellone later put at 14 to 16 months. Development began in October 2003. Co-founder Feargus Urquhart has stated the game was originally going to be released in 2005, and that after E3 2004 the date was moved up to December 2004, leaving the studio, in his words, to choose between getting in trouble and getting it done.

Avellone's 2013 retrospective interview adds the enforcement mechanism: “There would've been substantial penalties had we not made that date.” He called the shipped game “unfinished” in that same interview, and, notably, assigned part of the blame inward: Obsidian, he said, was at fault for not cutting enough early, and all the minigames should have been removed, along with some of the in-engine cutscenes. Both halves of that verdict are printed here because both are his.

The cuts themselves are documented in the shipped files and the studio's accounts. The droid planet M4-78 was removed entirely after E3 2004, when the team concluded it could not fit the schedule; its designer was Kevin Saunders. A major sequence in an HK factory, where HK-47 confronts the HK-50 assassins hunting the Exile, was cut. Companion scenes, dialogue, and ending material were dropped or compressed, which is why the game's finale resolves its cast's fates in a prophetic summary rather than in played scenes. The Xbox version, shipped two months before the PC version, also carried multiple unfixed bugs. One often repeated version of events, that LucasArts first promised a delay to 2005 verbally and then reversed it for business reasons, circulates in fan and trivia sources; it is consistent with Urquhart's dated account but the verbal agreement detail is not in the primary record opened for this page, so it is labeled as the secondary account it is.

The postscript is unique in games. Much of the cut material was left on the disc, and the fan community spent years restoring it: The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod rebuilds M4-78's replacement content, the HK factory, and numerous scenes from the shipped files, and later official re-releases made the mod easy to install on PC. When Aspyr's Nintendo Switch port was announced with the restored content as planned DLC, that DLC was later cancelled, a controversy that produced litigation; those events postdate the original record and are noted here only so the page does not imply the restoration ever became official. It has not. The finished KOTOR II exists only as a fan assembly, which is the final measure of how much the December date cost.