Does it matter where your shots land in Planetside 2?

You mean locational damage/different hitboxes? Headshots definitely do more damage, but I'm not sure about torso/extremities. Tanks also take more damage from behind and the sides.

As the answers are outdated, I think it can be necessary to provide an update for future readers.

Shooting the torso will do normal damages (as you can see in the weapons stats).
Shooting the arms or legs will reduce the damages.
Now when shooting the head, the rules are:

• Every standard weapon has a 2x headshot multiplier.
• The sniper rifles have a 2.1x headshot multiplier.
• Some special weapons break these rules (For example, the Daimyo has a 4x headshot multiplier)

It depends what kind of weapon you are using. Most infantry weapons do bonus damage when they hit the player's head hit box. Different types of infantry weapons do different amounts of bonus damage.

To my knowledge, none of the weapons on vehicles or aircraft do bonus head shot damage.

I thought this PS2 Weapon Data Sheet has the exact modifier for each weapon, but I can't seem to find it anymore...

From memory (this may have changed or I could be totally wrong)

• Sniper rifles do a 2x bonus damage modifier on head shots
• Rifles do 1.5x damage modifier
• shotguns do 1.25x damage modifier
• Mini-Chaingun does no bonus damage.

Yes, headshots do more damage. With the bolt action sniper rifles a headshot is an instant kill (most of the time). You always need to aim for the head. If you get a kill headshot you also gain 10xp more. But there are a few things to note.

Some weapons might have 0% headshot bonusdamage multiplier and others might have 200%.

http://www.planetside-universe.com/news-clarification-on-headshots-2507.htm