Hmm.
So BG2 is suddenly the unquestionable reference now ?
It's literally the immediate prequel game to the game we are talking about now though, and the character in question is one of the two main antagonists of said game. So in this case.....yeah? It should be at any rate. I'd say it's desirable to maintain continuity between entries in a series, otherwise we wouldn't be having discussions like this.
We have evidence for both interpretations in this thread.
In folklore or other settings, maybe. But in D&D outside of a few niche cases (Greater Mummies, Ghouls, many (but not all) incorporeal undead and liches IIRC.) undead seem to be pretty consistently described as 'soulless' though, and that includes vampires.
Purely logically, I would classify anything that has free will as still having a soul (somewhere), thus vampires would still have to have theirs. Otherwise I would like to know who exactly is at the driver seat in a vampire, if they have no soul.
Negative energy filling the empty spiritual shell left behind by the evacuation of the soul? Artificial sentience is not an unknown thing in the realms
