Screen Freezing at First Cutscene

[Jake]

I've been experiencing an issue where my game will be stuck on a screen that is half white and half black with the "Loading Resources" spinner on the bottom right constantly going, but never actually loads into the level.
PC Specs
Ryzen 7 5800x3D
32 GB 3200Mhz RAM
RTX 4070 FE (Driver Version 560.94)
X570 GigaByteAorus Elite WiFi (BIOS Ver 40d)
(C:) 1tb 970 pro
(D:) 2tb 980 pro

List of all the troubleshooting steps I've done (not in any particular order):
Updated and reinstalled GPU drivers
Updated the BIOS of my MoBo
Ran the game with steam in "offline" mode
Ran the game with the lowest possible graphic settings
Ran the game with different resolutions
validated game files
switched the installation folder from my (D:) drive to my (C:) drive and back
turned off all my overlay software MSI afterburner, Discord, etc.
I tried deleting my .config file
I changed my PC's Power plan from high performance to balanced

Any help or feedback is much appreciated!

[Warsmith Voss]

You have to put your game on your SSD.

If you look at the Steam page under it's requirements you have to put it on an SSD, so the best solution is just go to properties, files, and move to C: as that's more than likely your SSD.