Stuck in AbysseaFollow

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 outside 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?

I apologize if this is in the wrong forum or not... I'm at a loss. =[

Edited, Jan 26th 2013 6:56am by Shinzaku

This sounds more like a corrupt/missing DATs issue. Much as I'd hate to suggest a full reinstall, if a file check doesn't fix your issue, that's about the only recourse. To run the file check, if you don't know, you have to do it from the POL menu before you log in. But in also mentioning you picked the game up from Steam, well, I can't say I've heard many good things about this method of acquisition. The non-Steam alternative to installation would require finding a torrent or physical discs. In general, you wouldn't need the Steam client to play afterward despite presumably using codes from it to update your FFXI account.

Note there also may be some registry conflicts depending on if you had your old FFXI install still present when getting the Steam version. I couldn't tell you how to manually remove an offending registry safely, but if this is the case, then you're more than likely going to need to uninstall both iterations of the game and then just use one version exclusively.

Edited, Jan 26th 2013 8:53am by Seriha

Pretty much what the others said. It's a install issue; uninstall both versions of the game and do the full reinstall. DO NOT go to bg and get the updates after that, let it update on its own. Not that I don't trust it, but if it's this bad it's better to double dog sure you got it right.

Never had issues with doing it officially in the almost 11 years I've played this game.. Had issues with steam version, don't need a torrent from BG to get this game to work properly.