Game of Thrones: Season 7 has a shorter episode order than any of its previous seasons, but it's all for good reason. Even though Season 7 will be seven episodes instead of the typical 10, the series will be taking the same amount of production time on this season as earlier years. In simpler terms: more time is going to be spent making each episode in Season 7 to result in even bigger and more epic episodes.

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"I think the scale and size of the set pieces, the world that is being created it’s just getting more and more extraordinary and they feel they need that time to shoot seven hours as opposed to 10," actor Iain Glen, who plays Jorah Mormont, told Radio Times Season 6's excellent "The Battle of the Bastards" is an example of the type of episode Game of Thrones can produce when more time and resources are dedicated to making it. The episode took 25 days to film -- more than double the typical time allotted to normal episodes. Previous standout episodes, including Season 2's "Blackwater," Season 4's "Watchers on the Wall" and Season 5's "Hardhome" all ranged from three to four weeks of production to account for their more ambitious content, per The Los Angeles Times Game of Thrones: Season 7 started production in September and is expected to wrap shooting in February, via Entertainment Weekly , meaning it's been in production for about five months. That amount of time allows for more episodes to be made at the scale of previous seasons' standouts, meaning we're in for one heck of a season."This season you feel that the drama is moving towards its end game, more characters are overlapping so we are seeing a lot more of each other, than perhaps in the past. In the same scenes and we are going to the same places," said Glen.HBO still hasn't officially confirmed the length of the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones. While it's been expected it will be about eight episodes since showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have repeatedly said there are about 15 hours left of Game of Thrones to tell (including the seven-episode Season 7), a comment from Glen suggests that episode length for the final season might still be up in the air.As he told Radio Times, "They are taking the length of time it takes to shoot 10 episodes to shoot just seven this year and six next year. There are 15 more hours left in Thrones as we understand it, but that may change, but that’s as far as we know."Game of Thrones: Season 7 is expected to premiere in summer 2017.

Terri Schwartz is Entertainment Editor at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz