Having the same issue. I've tried every fix under the sun... this is what EA chat support told me today:
"And as I can see here you have tried all the troubleshooting so I will not waste your time in giving you any troubleshooting. In this case I would suggest you to please return the game and ask for the refund from the steam as you have purchased the game from the steam."
And... of course I'm past the Steam refund window as well.
How much RAM are you running, I'm curious to see if there's a pattern. A few people I know having hard-lock issues are running 64GB of RAM.
I did request a refund but apparently, I tried to fix it too long and that counts as playing even though the game won't get past the character creator. Steams customer service bites.
