In Souls games, the player has never been able to pause the game. If you go into your inventory or hit the start menu, the world continues to exist, time progresses, and usually, you return to find your character at a bonfire after being beaten to death. The same can be largely said about Elden Ring. However, at the time of writing, there is a method where the player can pause the game. If the player enters their inventory, they can hit the 'Inventory explanation' option, bringing up a tutorial tab, and this will pause the action until you clear this message. We imagine that this will be fixed in a patch pretty soon, so make use of this while you still can.