User blog comment:Zippertrain85/Vampires are NOT undead in TES/@comment-7813150-20140731000323

Well, the easiest way I can justify the argument for "vampires are undead" is to use Skyrim. Becoming a vampire flags your character as an undead creature, which causes certain undead-only effects to apply to your character, such as the Necromage perk. That's the end of the subject for most people, at least from a game mechanics standpoint...right there, hard-coded into the scripts, we have vampire=undead. End of discussion.

However, everything else in the game seems to disagree. The game says that vampires are undead, but vampires can drown, vampires can be poisoned, vampires can reproduce, vampires can get exhausted, vampires can use healing potions, and so forth...none of these things make sense unless vampires are living creatures. And in Skyrim, vampires can even walk around in the sunlight without a problem, violating just about every known vampire myth, legend, and work of fiction except "Twilight," And worst of all, you can be cured of it. You can't be cured of death, but you can be cured of UNdeath. Somehow.

In the next installment (oh please please let it be Elsweyr), I hope Bethesda chooses one way or another about the nature of vampires, and stays consistent. At the very least, they could remove the "unded" flag from vampires and leaving everything else alone...most players won't even notice.