Stuck in Forget About Freeman, Gear Not Moving

[PGibsonCoUk]

Been playing through fine without any issues (maybe one crash to desktop when loading a saved game but other than that, nothing I can't tolerate) until I got to Forget About Freeman. I've just gone through the sewer pipe labelled West, killed the Ichthyosaur and then went under the first rotating gear. Came up the ladder, past the steam vents and then disposed of the three barnacles on the way to the second gear and now my path is blocked. The gear is not rotating, it's just static and I can't seem to do anything about it.

It's been many years since I last played through Half-Life so I can't remember if I was supposed to hit any switch or turn a valve to make the gear rotate. I've backtracked all the way back to the collapsed ceiling way back, checked everything I can and I don't think I've missed anything and I'm wondering if it's a bug that the second set of gears is frozen.

I've reluctantly watched some walk-throughs of FAF and in none of the ones I've watched has the player seemingly done anything to make the second set of gears rotate, it's just always been rotating when they've got to it.

I've reloaded plenty of times - admittedly all the saves I've loaded are already in the level with the static gear so I don't know if I need to reload a much older save and go back through the game and try my luck but I'm obviously not keen to lose so much progress.

Anyone got any ideas? Is there something I have missed, is there something I can do in a console or config file or the save file to get the gear rotating?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.

[thray]

First, if you have any mods you need to uninstall them. No exceptions.

[thray]

You old saves and even your newer saves are broken.

Restart the chapter from the new game menu (quit using the old saves),
and you may want to do the following.

Revert to the old menu.
Right-click the game in Steam, select "Properties", and in the General tab select "Set Launch Options". Type "-oldgameui" in the launch config.


More tips
https://steamcommunity.com/app/362890/discussions/0/1755780323773671312/