Nah it would kill a bit of the suprise side of things. When you see a pokemon the first time you have literally no idea what it can do and it's your job to think of the possible builds it could be and react acordingly
If they have a specs item on they are only ever going to attack and they are locked to that attack
This isn't that game
Given the customization items so far are glorified stickers, it could be possible. Things like hats and glasses and whatnot would be more difficult though.
The starters cannot evolve.
that's not going to be removed, the games will just be changed
You need to catch another Eevee if you want to evolve it. The starter cant evolve
We haven't seen anything that indicates them being available on the stats page, and the options for giving a Pokemon an item so far are conspicuously missing.
I swear to God if Lance's final Pokemon is a Dragonair.
Since when?
Natures are still in the game, it'd be weird if they took out abilities and not natures.
We don't know. Stop believing bullshit you read online, that person has no idea. We haven't seen the Pokémon stats screen yet.
FYI what some people may be refering to is this when it comes to items and abilities being gone:
I wouldn't use this screen as evidence for that, since this screen only came up because Pikachu was learning Double Kick, but needed to forget a move. This isn't the normal stat screen though. Funnily enough, this did confirm one thing though: Natures are in, since the color for Attack and Defense cordinate with nature (It's a Lonely nature, so +Atk, -Defense)
Now to be fair, I'm not too confidant about items coming back since the option to put on an item did not show up in the demo when selecting a Pokemon. Abilities are still a big question mark at all. Still, Natures being in does raise some red flags for me, makes me wonder if we're just looking at some strange menu stuff.
Regardless though, I'll still try the game competitively. Lack of abilities and items would be a huge change, but it might be a nice contrast to the likely increasing complexity gen 8 will bring to the battle system.
Remember that we did only see a demo and one very early on in the game. Given this is supposed to be a GO player's first introduction to mainline Pokemon, hold items might just wind up unlocking and getting explained after the point we've seen.
A Dragonite without access multiscale or extreme speed likely wouldn't dominate as much, so it'd make for an interesting meta.
