We may earn a commission when you buy through links in our articles. Learn more.

How to fix the Modern Warfare 2 campaign crashing

Check out our helpful list of solutions to fix the Modern Warfare 2 campaign crashing problems that some players seem to be experiencing with MW2

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 Fix Crashing: A bearded man looking out of a car window

Want to know how to fix the Modern Warfare 2 campaign crashing? It appears some players are having crashing issues while playing through the campaign in Modern Warfare 2. It doesn’t matter if you’ve only just loaded into a mission or you’re trapped in the middle of a firefight, these crashes can appear at any time to instantly put a stop to your fun.

There are a number of valid reasons why your copy of Modern Warfare 2 may be experiencing crashing issues. Judging by the numerous reports online and our own playthroughs, the FPS game runs pretty well as long as your computer can handle the settings you’ve picked.

Modern Warfare 2 campaign crashing solutions

If you’re struggling to fix the crashing issues in Modern Warfare 2, here are some solutions that should be able to identify the cause of your problems.

Lower your graphics settings

Sometimes the most obvious answer is the correct one. While you might think your ageing computer should be able to run Modern Warfare 2 with ease, you may want to tone down some of your settings if you’re running into issues.

With over 500 individual graphics settings to choose between, we highly recommend picking the lowest graphics preset if you’re experiencing crashing problems. This preset drops every setting down to the lowest possible value to ensure you can run the game smoothly. However, we also have a handy guide to the best Modern Warfare 2 settings to help you run the game smoothly without making too many compromises in terms of the visuals.

If your crashing issues stop after selecting the lowest preset option, you can bump it up to the next highest setting until you experience problems again. Once you’ve found your computer’s limit, you can tweak individual settings if you want to ensure you’re getting maximum performance from your machine. That said, it’s a lot easier to drop down to a preset which wasn’t causing any crashing problems.

We can confirm from first-hand experience that this fix worked for us – the game ran smoothly on Ultra High graphics settings but would crash every now and then. Decreasing everything to Balanced thwarted the crashes.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 campaign crashing fix: a bearded man standing on a military air base.

Enable Hi-Rez Assets Cache

This solution can also be chalked up to pushing your computer to its limits, but we need to stress how important this single setting can be to help stop crashes. If you insist on using high-resolution assets, you need to clear up at least 32GB of hard drive space and enable ‘Hi-Rez Assets Cache’ in the settings. This creates a cache that helps stream assets when needed; if you don’t enable this setting, Modern Warfare 2 could experience stuttering, hitching, and crashes.

Scan and repair Modern Warfare 2

Some of the game files you downloaded may be corrupt, and this can cause Modern Warfare 2 to crash when it loads broken files. The easiest solution is to open up the Battle.net application, select the cog next to the blue play button and press ‘scan and repair’. Choosing this option will have the app look through your game files to determine which ones need replacing. A word of warning, though: this can cause Battle.net to download the entire game again, so you may want to keep an eye out if you have a bandwidth cap.

If you’re on Steam, right-click on the game in your library, click on properties, then local files, and select the option to verify the integrity of game files.

Those are some solutions you can try to stop your Modern Warfare 2 campaign from crashing. Once your game is running smoothly, you may want to know how many Modern Warfare 2 missions there are, as well as the campaign length to determine how play sessions you need to go through Captain Price’s story. If you reach the end of the game, don’t forget to check out our Modern Warfare 2 ending guide to relive the main story beats. Also, check out our rankings of the best Call of Duty campaigns to see what kind of competition MW2’s story faces.