Recently, Fallout: New Vegas creator Josh Sawyer presented a new video in which he answered a fan's question – the fan wanted to know about the developers' approach to choosing decisions that would be reflected in the final slides:
Hi, I'd like to ask if you could clarify one point about the final slides in the games you've worked on. When it's decided what gets a final slide and what doesn't – does it depend on the specific writer/designer working on that questline, or is it more of a creative director's decision to determine what's important enough for a final slide?
Josh Sawyer said it's "pretty arbitrary." According to him, it's mostly decided by the game director. Based on his experience, he said that designers almost never "try to push their quests to get into those final slides":
Usually, there are things that we kind of take for granted and assume will definitely make it into the slides. For example, key choices at the end of the game, faction alliances – if you supported a faction, betrayed it, or destroyed its leader, we want to show what that decision led to.
Sawyer recalled the quest "Flags of Our Foul-Ups," in which the protagonist helps a group of NCR soldiers. It can be completed in several ways, and one of the most unconventional was giving the soldiers the combat stimpak "psycho." The developers thought about the consequences of such an option and eventually decided to create a separate final slide for it:
And with that option, we thought: "Oh, they'll probably just snap [during the battle] and start killing everyone, even those who weren't involved in the conflict at all." Well, that's why we decided to make a final slide for it. But in general, such decisions are made quite arbitrarily. There's no clear, strict methodology here. We just need to reflect the key moments, and everything after that is more for the player's entertainment.
Josh Sawyer's video is available at the following link.