Beleive it or not, it's an artistic decision. I actually like it personally.
Though I think it's to cover up for how the game's specific texture compression (JXR aka. Microsoft HD Photo aka. JPEG XR) doesn't work as well for dark colours as it does for other colours.
I've tried the image format myself with XnView (free tool to convert images to tons of different formats) and it works out very well and produces great quality at low filesizes, only problem is there is some pretty evident compression artifacts with the dark colours.