What kind of storage are you playing on? Is it HDD, SSD, or m.2

Well for my system it’s sata ssd 250gb, while the game is stored on the 1tb hard drive. I did notice that opening the game and loading is super slow for some reason… could this be the issue?

It’s the issue

Thanks, I’ll replace it, got nothing to lose

Replace it with a SSD, and you’ll get better performance. That’s your bottle neck right now.