My friends and I encountered the same problem but we found a reliable workaround. Essentially, you create a multiplayer lobby with one or more custom characters for them to log into later.
You should first identify which player (or players) were causing the issue. In our case only one player was causing this problem and games without them ran fine. Try running a few lobbies to narrow it down.
Next, look up how to create multiple custom characters. There should be guides on youtube on how to do that, I used the one by “Channel5 Gaming”.
We didn’t encounter any problems using this method and the game ran fine. It seems like the problem occurs only during character creation.
