Table of Contents
F1 Manager 2023
“The intense world of Formula 1® comes alive for a new season in F1® Manager 2023. 23 races, six F1® Sprint events, new cars, new circuits including the Las Vegas Strip Circuit, new drivers, new challenges… Your legacy begins here.”
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“Lead your team to glory in F1® Manager 2024. A new Formula 1® season has arrived, packed with 24 races, new cars, new Team Principals and an updated F1® Sprint race format. Start your career at one of 10 official F1® teams or create your own for the very first time.”
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~The announcement of the '24 edition of this same game, proving that some games have very efficient development cycles indeed.1)
F1 Manager 2023 is a Frontier Developments2) management simulation with an F1 theme. It's the first time I am playing a game like this, and even after 30 hours I still haven't really figured it out yet. It seems like it will take playing several seasons, ie. more than 100 hours worth of playtime, before you can really start understanding where this game wants to go, so I'm looking forward to many more hours of what does amount to quite a bit of fun. Unlike F1 2020 where you make your mistakes yourself (because you're driving yourself), in this game you are the one telling your drivers to make the mistakes, while simultaneously hoping that they don't. The game uses real F1 voice lines from real drivers, which at first felt like a funny and nice addition, but due to the lack of variety does very quickly end up getting annoying. I think I will turn that off rather sooner than later, but this doesn't stop the game from being fun. Trying to fight your way into the top 10 to snag some sneaky points is actually really engaging, even if you mostly just sit back and watch your drivers being overtaken.
Music
F1 Manager 2023 was developed in Unreal Engine, which always means headache. I ended up finding a new tool, called PakExplorer to extract not the entire game, but only the Wwise Audio folders. From there, I was greeted with a file and folder structure I hadn't seen before. With a bit of searching, /LegacySoundbanks/Windows/Music.pck contains the kind of audio I was primarily looking for. I actually wrote about that discovery on this Steam thread. Unlike .bnk files, foobar2000 with the vgmstream plugin does not support .pck, so I defaulted to Wwise Unpacker which worked like a charm.
After finding my most favorite tracks (which were the reason I extracted the music in the first place) I uploaded those to YouTube to make sure that they aren't forgotten. Usually I am a fan of uploading entire soundtracks, but the music I ended up with consisted of 207 individual files, all with the fairly nondescript names of “Music_1” through “Music_207”. The videos I uploaded are already a disgrace to my otherwise nicely formatted video titles, but 207 of them? Nah, man.
User Viperr101 asked for help with getting the audio files and/or finding the music they are looking for, which is the primary reason I am writing this page right now. I care a lot about the music I extract, and I am always very glad when I get the opportunity to help people like that, even if it means uploading a 1GB folder of music to the cloud on a 1MB/s connection (and probably even slower in upload).
F1 Manager 2023 is a weird case in terms of its soundtrack. When you search for “F1 Manager 2023” you get results for the 2022 game, and one compilation of some tracks of the 2023 game. Apparently 2023 recycles some of 2022 music? It reuses some of the themes? Or they are a direct copy? I actually don't know, I haven't played 2022, but the whole experience of trying to find 2023 music is very weird. My own contributions to that won't exactly be much more helpful either, considering it's only like 6 files out of 207 (although many of them sound similar) and they don't even have proper names. With this in mind, I totally understand why someone would just want to have the folder with the music and look for themselves, because clicking through 207 YouTube videos is even worse than what I had to do - clicking through 207 audio files stored locally on my PC - and despite being a lot easier was already kind of painful. Godspeed, Viperr101.