Diablofans.com has used their nifty Dev Tracker to sniff out some recent information on Diablo 3 item customizations. It appears that the game will still allow for socketed items as shown in the D3 playable demo at Blizzcon last year. Runewords, it appears, have run their course and any new "rune" related chatter will be associated with the skill system. There are also going to be some other options available...but they won't say what yet.

Here's the official post from Diablofans.com:

Someone asked the question this morning about item customization and how it will be handled in D3, although Bashiok doesn't give us anything too solid he does confirm that sockets will still be used, and that runewords will not, but runes will be part of the skill tree and they are getting away from those as inserts, he also hints that there will be more coming, but we don't know what yet.

Check it out:

Original Post/Question:

Will there be more ways to customize your items than in previous games, or(this might be a bad question)will the players be able to customize items at all in D3?

If so, in which ways?

Replies from Bashiok:

Thus far we've shown that items do have sockets, and gems can be placed in them. We're not continuing runewords, and the term 'rune' is now associated with the rune/skill system. What other options may be available, we're not telling.

We haven't released any information on our site, but it was possible to collect socketed items as well as gems in the BlizzCon demo, so any news site or fan site that attended MAY have included that as information. I don't remember any specifically reporting on it off the top of my head.

The gem stats at this point are more or less just the basics yanked from Diablo II to get the system running and have something to play around with.

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