The Game of Thrones showrunners Benioff and Weiss preview season 3, and also address how the show will change moving forward.

Promoting the upcoming third season of Game of Thrones, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss participated in a conference call with various news outlets earlier this week.

Hitfix reports that in the call, Benioff reaffirmed what has been stated many times before, that season 3 is the one they’ve been looking forward to since starting the show. And they aren’t expecting any future season to top it.

“The third season of Game of Thrones is probably as big as we’re going to get,” he says. “Season 3 is probably the biggest in terms of the number of new characters, number of new stories overall. The universe has expanded as much as it’s going to, and now it’s going to contract,” as some characters are removed from the story.

However, where season 3 won’t have a big battle, we do have one to look forward to in season 4 which Benioff deems “even bigger than Blackwater.”

And there might be more surprises coming – like characters being killed off in the show that weren’t in the books (like Dany’s handmaidens), or characters that don’t die at all! “We would not rule out the idea that a character who gets whacked in the book series makes it through the TV series,” Benioff teases.

They also discuss what might happen if George R.R. Martin doesn’t finish the series before the TV show catches up to him. Benioff says that while they’d prefer the books to come out first, “we’re not going to take a two-year hiatus (to wait for a book). The little kids are growing older, the show’s got momentum now, and the show must go on. We’re just hopeful that it will all time out.”

Could we see Martin’s story wrapped up in the TV show before the final book is released? How would the fanbase even respond to that?!

Game of Thrones season 3 premieres Sunday at 9/8c on HBO!