Game of Thrones’ final season will air during the first half 2019

Game of Thrones fans still don’t have an official release date for the show’s final season, but HBO has confirmed that it will air during the first half of 2019.

Game of Thrones fans have had to endure an entire year without their favorite series, a year that’s been void of news regarding the final season’s release. While we still don’t have an exact date for the eighth season’s debut, HBO has finally offered us a time frame.

During a speaking commitment at the Television Critics Association press tour, HBO programming president Casey Bloys confirmed that the show’s final run will take place during “the first half of 2019.” Apart from that, he remained pretty quiet about the plans for Game of Thrones’ future.

Bloys did also confirm that the final season will only be six episodes long, something fans have known for a while now. Though many of us had hoped the showrunners would compensate by giving us longer episodes, Bloys shot down the idea that we’ll be getting feature-length episodes from season 8.

During an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Bloys responded to a question about two-hour episodes stating: “Not two-hours? Yes, they are not going to be. Not that I’ve seen anyway.” He also stated that he’s uncertain about a trailer date, though he “would guess” it would be sometime this year.

But the series finale isn’t the only thing we have to look forward to. HBO is moving forward with one of its Game of Thrones spinoff series, a story based off of “The Long NIght.” This time period marks the early days of the White Walkers in Westeros. So while we may say farewell to Jon and Daenerys next year, it looks like we might see more of the Night King in the future.

Filming for the new series is set to begin in October, which hopefully means we won’t need to spend another year away from Westeros.

Until HBO releases more news for both series, we’ll just have to hope that the future of Westeros is epic enough to warrant all this waiting.