Looooong loading screen

That’s almost certainly the cause. External SSDs have to go through a path on your PC which is slower than the SATA or PCIe buses and has a lower priority in Windows. Try reinstalling the game to either of your internal drives and you should get significantly improved load times. In general USB drives like this are best for files that don’t need to constantly read/write data - things more like pictures, videos, music, etc. You can run games off of them but we tend to expect performance issues of different varieties.

@rocdog - your issue would be unrelated. The OP is having constant long load screens constantly due to using an external HD, but you can try the steps I posted in my first message and if that doesn’t help you can try starting your own thread for more help or contacting our support team. We also can’t help with game feedback here - you’d want to post that in #general-discussion