High Fantasy, particularly in video games, is built on a set of templates that are so well-worn the fabric has gotten all see-through. A good reference for these templates is, rather than Tolkien, Warhammer Fantasy, which is sort of a deliberate attempt to stuff every fantasy trope you can think of into one pot and then put in too much pepper. Elder Scrolls is sort of the same thing, in that it puts a lot of familiar tropes into a pot but then it doesn't season them enough and also the pot has a leak in it and is very ugly. I guess I don't really give a shit about lore in Elder Scrolls.
If I were to write some shitty Elves and made no attempt to break the mold, they'd be like this:
1. Have no facial hair. This is pretty much the most important thing when you think about it. Dark Elves (and their whateverthefuck analogues, Drow, or who gives a shit?) are allowed to have goatees, and maybe Fu Manchu?
2. Are old. But they don't look old. Might not be immortal, technically, but it doesn't matter because you'll never see one die of old age or even really hear about this being a thing that can happen.
3. Are awesome at stuff. Usually a lot of stuff. Usually because Elves represent the author's narcissistic masturbatory spunk. Typically the first thing authors do to break mold is to find some "flaws" to strap onto their Elves so that it's harder to notice the smell.
4. Are magic. This kind of fits under number 3, because Fantasy is really just "a thing, but magic", so being magic makes you the best pretty much by definition unless you're evil. I'm setting it aside to distinguish it from the assumption that there are also tons of other stuff Elves are good at.
5. Are pretty. No matter what you say, kind of inescapable. Elder Scrolls Elves are pretty much the ugliest they can get, and it's mostly just because everything in Bethesda games is ugly. At most you edge closer to the fair folk look, which makes their faces pointy in addition to the ears, but you're still never going to see an Elf with bad skin or asymmetrical bits or a bald patch.
Oh, and 6. pointy ears. But, that pretty much goes without saying? But not as much as the "no beards" rule, which is such a given that it's hard to even realize it's there, like "Look around you, what do you see" and you say "The floor." Unless you are on the floor.
It's also pretty typical for Elves to branch off into a couple of extreme categories, especially Dark Elves, who are Elves if the author was a Goth.
So anyway, if you're writing Fantasy genre and you're not coming up with actually new stuff like Myst or like Blizzard's crazy panda people, you're probably going to want to stick pretty closely to the template so that A. readers can save some time by generalizing about your Elves according to the stereotype, and B. when you do introduce a spin, it has more impact. Bethesda is particularly vindicated in doing this, because by doing most of the lore by the book, what sets Tamriel apart from every other shitty generic brand fantasy world is the fact that the player him- or herself is in it murdering guards and stealing everything. The game sells a lot of units because of the idea that it's "any High Fantasy, in a sandbox".
Finally, on topic, what I'm saying is that OP's assessment that Elves do not look like Elves is a statement that is meaningful in the context of Elder Scrolls, because Elder Scrolls deliberately doesn't stray too far from stereotypes most of the time. I kind of agree, in that the Elves are indeed emphatically repellant and unpleasant to behold, but I persist in the belief that this is mostly a matter of technical and artistic limitations and not of an intention to impose some kind of interesting variation on the rut. I guess we can call that a happy accident? East-Germanic Rome-sacking Goth Dark Elves is pretty interesting!
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