Stuck in Abyssea

I reinstalled Final Fantasy XI, fresh through STEAM earlier today. It is the Abyssea collection, and everything went smoothly. I logged in, and was able to play fine. However... here is where is gets tricky.

Got invite to Abyssea, went over into Abyssea and then things got weird.
ALL of the NPCs were titled as simply NPC - no unique names or anything. I was not able to interact with a single NPC in the zone.

After 4 minutes, the game tried to push me out of the zone - good I thought! Nope, it simply states "Exiting now," and did nothing... even after sitting there for half an hour.

I contacted Tech Support, and they told me it was a port issue and connections or something. I opened up all ports they said, and now I am left with this:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6215593/FFXI/screenshot1.png
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6215593/FFXI/screenshot2.png
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6215593/FFXI/screenshot3.png
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/6215593/FFXI/screenshot4.png

I am baffled.
I am running Windows 7, 64-bit. ALL of my drivers are up-to-date. I was not able to contact Tech Support again due to being business hours.

It is really disheartening to come back after a year to play... and not be able to play. I don't understand.

Instead of repeating "exiting now," you can see it simple states: "L." My character is frozen, and I cannot access any in-game commands or menus. It is acting as if it were getting into a cutscene... but not doing anything.

I've tried reinstalling the entire game, and that did not work either.


Ideas?

If you have a friend nearby who also plays FFXI you might try logging in to your account from their computer.

Unfortunately I don't have that option. :(

I've never seen or heard of that before, so I don't know what to suggest. It sounds like some files were erroneous and the models didn't load correctly, but that should have been fixed with a reinstall.

You may still wanna try it, just to see if it helps.From the POL screen do a file check on FFXI and redownload corrupted files if necessary.

Yep, that fixed it. I can't believe I didn't think of that.
Why did that fix it and not a new install?

oh the joys of technology... when it works >.> lol

I have no idea, it should have been fixed with a new install. Maybe the installer itself was corrupted didn't download necessary files or something, who knows. Guess it doesn't matter now, as long as it's fixed.

Great to hear that your fix resolved the issue Arcon. The file check feature on the PlayOnline viewer is a great tool to check for any sort of corrupted files, even ones that occur during installation. If we see any players who have this issue in the future we will be sure to reference this post! Thanks.