I think they just mean that for the game to work, you'll need art assets, etc. from the original game that aren't part of the code they open-sourced. I don't think it's a licensing restriction. (And even if it were, they released it under the GPLv3, which says "If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term.", so you could just ignore it.)
It certainly sounds like all you need is in the repository, and the usage of the resulting binaries are still restricted. Whether they find assets correctly or not correctly should not matter, if they are somewhere else.
> the usage of the resulting binaries are still restricted
To use the binaries, you need the game assets. The only legal way to acquire the game assets is to own the game, as EA have not included them in this release.
This is less a licensing issue, but stating the real limitations, that EA aren't volunteering to do the leg work to remove. Which is fine.
You could word it differently. Why not mention it?
It is separate problem if runtime assets are missing and the game is not actually a game without them or gives an error message. Let's also assume that you can bypass DX dependencies with other means.
The current wording sounds like binaries are always proprietary, no matter what.
