I figured out the solution. You have to put your mouse just above the good by and there should be a highlight that comes up that is above goodbye. When you highlight goodbye it has 2 bars one above and below it. There will be one similar to that. Click on it and it will progress you to the next area. I'll upload a picture.
I'm having the same issue, only just outside of the starter area. I don't seem to have that invisible highlight option mentioned by Daveed316. Everything I interact with says "offline" and my quest tracker has generic "Tracker Goal Text" for each objective.
Can't really progress this way (plus would be nice to read the quests, since this is an RPG and all). Anyone find a fix for this that works outside of the starter area (preferably something that doesn't involve bypassing dialogue)?
EDIT: I guess I should mention that I tried reloading the UI as mentioned above but that didn't do anything. I also quit and restarted a couple times which had no effect.
I guess I should also mention that I didn't have this problem initially. I got through the starter area and got the first quest in the outside area right after. Load times were really long so I turned down my graphics/effects and that's when this started.
I just tried turning them all back to where they were (on max settings) and that has not corrected the issue. Don't know if it was something with the change that caused the problem or if it was just coincidental, but thought it might help to mention it. At least the load time is normal now, but this text problem is bringing my game play to a standstill.