I actually first played it when I borrowd a couple of games from my neighbor - one of them was Freelancer.
He played it for only about the first few minutes and never even got into space, so he told me it's a point and click detective game. You could imagine my amazement when I hit the "launch" to space and saw Manhattan out of orbit:P
That was a long time ago, in about 2004, methinks.
As for Discovery, I simply got bored with SP when I played it again in 2009 and searched for a couple od Mods, with Discovery having the most appealing map, story and server load for me, as well as being an RP server