I just booted up the game again after a long time not playing and found that everything looked a bit bland, so I went into settings to see if my graphics settings had changed and I found that "World Detail" now only goes up to "Normal" where it used to be able to go to "High" and introduce nice lighting and fog etc. Why?...
There's a part of me that vaguely recalls the devs making a change like this because even though you set the setting there it never actually did anything, I just can't recall if this was the setting and I can't be bothered digging through dev posts. With that being said, there was a massive memory leak in the game a little while back that was causing the game to crash when the game exceeded its RAM allocation if 4GB, as its only a 32bit app and it appeared avoidable if graphic settings were lowered. With that being the case it wouldn't surprise me if the solution wasnt something like removing a higher graphic setting in order to patch fix the memory leak. I'm not by any means confirming that's the case, it's just a thought.