Washed-out colours/bad lighting?

[Ilean]

Here's a daytime picture.



Yes, it's overcast and it may be realistic, but is it nice to look at? No, it's dull and drab. It's a shame because the graphics otherwise are fantastic.

Is it just my game? Because that is pretty much what I'm looking at all the time.

I think your monitor needs adjusting, the pic looks decent for me. Of course everything looks even blander if you don't enable shadows.

If you disabled them for performance concerns, I would recommend that you lower drawing quality instead, setting background drawing quality to 2 makes a huge difference in GPU load.