Creation is built on code over 20 years old at this point, and it shows. If they could have upgraded it to handle modern needs, I think they would have. Sarah Morgan looks like plastic in just about every lighting environment I've seen so far except for the room you meet her in. The conversation system may be an upgrade over what they were able to do with Daggerfall, but compared to its contemporaries from the likes of CDPR and Larian (even BioWare's old Mass Effect trilogy), it really feels lacking when they can't implement proper directed camera angles or performance capture.

Their side quest designers (referring here primarily to "activities" and non-faction quests) are either terrible at their craft or confined to an engine that can only easily spit out fetch quests where nothing interesting happens on the way to fetch the macguffin, once again, like their contemporaries can and do; the bar has been raised since the days of Fallout 3 and Skyrim.

When flying, the game loads you into an area where you always have to fly the "last mile" and dock, and the only reason I can imagine you would build it that way is that they couldn't make their engine load the space they need to load in a seamless way, like their competitors making other space games.