Judging by the first 8 books, I do not expect for things to be tied up neatly or for whatever happens to be more than just the epic convergence of powers for this given century/millennium/whatever. Because the Malazan series feels more like a series about the world in a stretch of time, and the things that happened during that time and the people involved in those events than a story about a specific set of events. And one of the most prominent themes in the books is how small and insignificant everything really is, when the story's history goes back hundreds of thousands of years and spans countless worlds and civilizations.

The characters do sort of hold the story together though, because for the most part the ones introduced in book 1 stay important throughout, aside from ones that bite the dust (it's no called the Book of the Fallen for nothing), so it isn't just a collection of disparate events. Just that whatever connection between them is much more tenuous than HP, or WoT, or anything else of that sort. But I highly recommend it.