Shorter and Unlocked Recoil

Shorter and Unlocked Recoil halves the duration of the game's recoil animations, which play when you hit a blocking enemy. The mod also unlocks movement while recoiling for both the player and NPCs. Furthermore, it removes most camera sway while power attacking (a little bit of scope creep never hurt anyone). It should be noted that, while I did make efforts to keep it relatively smooth, the transition from recoil animations to other animations is more abrupt than vanilla.

In addition to the aforementioned animation tweaks, the mod makes two final changes: first, actors are slightly less likely to attack other blocking actors. Second, the base fatigue cost of swinging a weapon is now five instead of seven. Actors move around more with this mod enabled due to the recoil animations no longer rooting them in place, so the latter change helps prevent fatigue from depleting too quickly.

Things to note

No recoil variety

Only the recoil files with the "_01" suffix have been changed. The others are duplicates. This means that the second and third variations of the recoil animations will not play. They are only subtly different, so this is not a big loss, in my opinion.

Why unlock movement while recoiling?

Movement while recoiling has been unlocked not because I wanted it to be, but because it proved to be the easiest solution (with my limited skill set) to an annoying quirk of vanilla recoil animations: in contrast to stagger animations, where all movement is locked, recoil animations let you nudge your character around while recoiling (and power attacking) by quickly tapping the movement buttons. Once I became aware of this clearly unintended behavior, it became difficult to not abuse it. For obvious reasons, unlocking the movement fixes it, although it is a drastic change.

Why do enemies sometimes briefly move in a straight line after I block their attack?

This is vanilla behavior. NPCs using Hand to Hand (which is completely untouched by this mod and already has movement unlocked while recoiling) also do this. If they hit a blocking enemy while moving in any direction, they continue moving in that direction for a little bit.

Compatibility

Shorter and Unlocked Recoil should be compatible with almost all mods. However, it appears to be incompatible with Bashing Reworked.