I cannot say this will work for everyone, but it’s worked for tens of people. The issue, for me at least, is my NVMe SSD is too fast. If you install it on an older NVMe SSD, or a regular SSD or HDD it will work.
If you only have the fast NVMe SSD, then here’s what you can do.
Download CrystalDiskMark
Settings > NVMe SSD
To the right of “All” change it to 9, 64GiB, THE DRIVE D4 IS INSTALLED ON, MB/s
Click “All”
Start D4 and Spam Mouse Click to get through the Cinematics
Create your Character
If it’s frozen at “Pending,” restart the game with CrystalDiskMark again.
If the game freezes, try again. Often, it will take me several attempts from steps 3 to 5. On average 3, sometimes as many as 7. If it doesn’t work, then you have a different issue (maybe).
I had this same problem in the server slam beta, and I’m sad to see they didn’t fix it even though there was a long thread on the forums related to it. It works fine for me when I move my game files to a slower SSD (non NVMe).
Managed to get in this way, only have one drive so there were no other options for me. Quit the game and it worked again after restarting from step 4. Such a weird temporary “fix”.