stuck on loading screen for many hours..

[GHOST]

I've been stuck in the loading screen for all of the 6.3 hours I have on this game. The furthest I got was the prologue which went smooth but took 20 minutes to load up beforehand. I've looked online about things I could do and here's everything I've got.
- uninstalled and reinstalled the game
- restarted my computer
- verified game files through steam
- checked error logs
- changed graphic settings in game to the lowest (didn't do anything)
- when playing with two other people on multiplayer (the one time i was able to make it into the prologue) they loaded in and finished the prologue before i had even loaded in. once they finished the prologue they were playing the actual game and i was still stuck on the loading screen. after about an hour they said i had "loaded into the game" meaning there was a character that was just standing at the spawn but i was still seeing the loading screen, this delayed their game play so I left. before you ask, they are both on my friends on steam. I've seen people say having the people they are playing with friended has fixed it for them but it doesn't work for me.
- people have said to update the graphics drivers but that option is not available to me, i can't click on that option
- computer is fully up to date along with all the hardware

i don't know what else to do so if someone has any recommendations please let me know. I just want to play the game with my friends man i did not just pay 20 bucks to watch the loading screen transition. i also don't think i could get a refund at this point.

[Lord Gremlin]

SAME ISSUE

[Middle45bro]

yeah having this issue with joining my friends game