Heya(TL;DR below),

I've been meaning to ask if you guys think vampire templars make any sense from a lore point of view. This isn't a topic for bashing the choices ZOS has made in regards to their game design whatsoever. I understand that sometimes game mechanics override lore when it comes to gameplay. I'm pretty sure a few of you still remember the day when paladins were allowed to use their holy spells against the Forsaken back in vanilla and boy... did they get roasted until Blizzard changed it. They changed a whole lot of things after that. Fire spells used to heal or deal no damage whatsoever to fire elementals but now they do etc etc. to 'balance' the game. But I digress...

Without taking a glance at the class descriptions once more I'll try to draw my conclusions purely from memory. Iirc it said that Templars draw their power from the sun and the aedric realms(?) and they're basically your holy class that could be used to build a priest / paladin type of character. In every known universe vampires have always been susceptible to holy. Okay, there may be a few game / movie universes where vampires weren't exactly affected by 'holy' stuff but they're a huge minority.

Back in Morrowind the sun killed vampires. Drawing power from the sun would kill a vampire, logically. I'm assuming that the vampires in Skyrim and Oblivion were a different... breed. So the sun did not really kill them. Even though TES series has been a singleplayer franchise thus far I strongly believe the change to vampires in Oblivion and Skyrim was due to casualization and dumbing down of the series to appeal to a more casual audience. Whether you agree with me on this one is pretty irrelevant. From what I can remember these vampires that don't die from the sunlight have become part of the lore, pretty much. But perhaps somebody more lore-savvy could confirm this. I do remember there was some book that described many types of vampires and had a fairly surprising ending..

The sun still weakened vampires in Oblivion and Skyrim(not sure about this one), however, and it doesn't make much sense for a vampire to use powers drawn from any holy sources, including the sun. Assuming there is a way to bypass this premise that vampires cannot use holy magic nor benefit from it, it would still seem rather... I can't find the right word right now so I'll just go with 'meh'.

On top of that I was just curious if becoming a vampire in ESO changes your face and whether there are any screenshots of turned players somewhere around to look at. At the moment I'm still oblivious so I thought I'd voice my opinion on the matter. I would have ideally liked it if we could switch between two faces, the regular human one as well as the grotesque and frightening vampire visage. You know, like in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? I really liked how vampires looked in that universe. I think Dawnguard of Skyrim went a similar route and some of the vampires looked quite appealing to me in that... grotesque manner. Anyway....


TL;DR

1.) Does it make sense for vampire templars to exist lorewise?

2.) Does the player's appearance change when they become a vampire and is it possible to hide the fact that they're a vampire in public? Perhaps it could work like the ability worgen have in WoW, 'Two Forms' so that a vampire is revealed if she attacks?

3.) What exactly is the difference between the vampire clans of Morrowind and the ones we can become in Oblivion and Skyrim? What type of vampire can we become in ESO? Is it the same breed as inone of the previous games or is it something entirely different?